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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

Archaeology

Volume 1 of 1

Off the Record: Archaeology and Documentary Filmmaking

Translated from her own manuscript

by

Kathryn Elizabeth Rogers

Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

September 2019

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

ABSTRACT

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

Archaeology

Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Off the Record: Archaeology and Documentary Filmmaking

Kathryn Elizabeth Rogers

Archaeologists have long expressed frustrations with how archaeology is portrayed in the documentary genre, contending that filmmakers and programme makers sensationalise, dumb-down, and misrepresent the study of the material past on screen. Yet, whilst we demand that “the media” broadly speaking, and “documentary” more specifically, should understand and represent our discipline in all its complexity, we must ask ourselves: are we willing to do the same in return? The purpose of this thesis is to locate archaeology’s place in documentary, and documentary’s place in archaeology. The aim is not to merely interject into the discourse on this matter but to reset the agenda, by profiling, problematizing, and reframing how archaeologists understand the relationship between the discipline of archaeology and the practice of documentary filmmaking, particularly with an eye to a UK context. To this purpose a mixed- methods strategy was undertaken, including: a survey of UK-based archaeologists profiling their experiences of and attitudes to archaeology documentaries; a historical survey of archaeology’s treatment in non-fiction filmmaking from the 1890s to the 2010s; and an autoethnographic study of the making of an archaeology documentary, as seen from the filmmaker’s perspective. By identifying and interrogating the instances of confusion, unease, and conflict that arise when these two fields converge, as well as those instances of shared benefit and similitude, this thesis seeks to cultivate a space for greater awareness, mutual understanding, honest dialogue and intellectual growth. Ultimately, I contend that archaeologists are filmmakers too, and despite the many tensions and misunderstandings between the two fields, nonfiction and documentary filmmaking has indeed played an overlooked and underappreciated role in the conception and development of archaeology as a discipline.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... i List of Tables ...... vii List of Figures ...... ix List of Stills ...... xi Academic Thesis: Declaration of Authorship...... xvii Acknowledgements ...... xix Definitions and Abbreviations ...... xxi Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Introduction ...... 1 1.2 Previous research ...... 2 1.3 My contribution ...... 4 1.4 Central research question ...... 5 1.5 Scope of study ...... 5 1.6 Thesis outline ...... 6

Chapter 2 Literature Review ...... 9

2.1 Introduction ...... 9 2.2 How archaeologists define archaeology documentaries ...... 10 2.3 Archaeological perspectives on cinematic documentaries ...... 12 2.4 Archaeological perspectives on factual TV ...... 14

2.4.1 Television as dissemination and outreach ...... 14 2.4.2 Television as mediation ...... 18 2.4.3 Television as theory ...... 21

2.5 Archaeological perspectives on filmmaking as a scientific record . 24

2.5.1 Videography at Çatalhöyük ...... 25 2.5.2 Videography in the PATINA Project ...... 31 2.5.3 Emergent issues in filmmaking for scientific recording ...... 33

2.5.3.1 Filmmaking as a form of technology ...... 33 2.5.3.2 Filmmaking as a form of surveillance ...... 36 2.5.3.3 Filmmaking in the form of remixing ...... 38 2.5.3.4 Filmmaking as “giving voice” ...... 39

i

2.5.3.5 Scientific recording and filmmaking terminology ...... 41

2.5.4 Further critiques regarding filmmaking as a scientific record. 42

2.6 Filmmaking as creative and collaborative community enquiry ...... 44

2.6.1 A creative treatment of archaeology ...... 44 2.6.2 Filmmaking as community co-production ...... 46

2.7 Concluding thoughts ...... 51

Chapter 3 The Off the Record Survey ...... 55

3.1 Introduction ...... 55 3.2 Survey design and method of analysis ...... 56

3.2.1 Survey aims ...... 56 3.2.2 Survey objectives ...... 56 3.2.3 Survey scope ...... 57 3.2.4 Questionnaire design ...... 57 3.2.5 Survey sampling strategy and results ...... 58 3.2.6 Method of survey data collection ...... 59 3.2.7 Survey ethics, anonymisation, and data protection ...... 60 3.2.8 Method of analysis ...... 60 3.2.9 Comparative studies ...... 62

3.3 The Off the Record survey findings ...... 64

3.3.1 Who is taking part, and how? ...... 64 3.3.2 Problems and concerns raised by archaeologists ...... 71 3.3.3 Aspirations, hopes, and desires for documentary held by archaeologists ...... 82 3.3.4 Other survey findings and observations ...... 89 3.3.5 Concluding thoughts ...... 91

Chapter 4 Off the historical record I : archaeology and documentary filmmaking between the 1890s and 1940s ...... 93

4.1 Introduction ...... 93

4.1.1 A word on primary source material ...... 94 4.1.2 Revisiting how archaeologists define archaeology documentaries ...... 94

ii

4.1.3 How documentary theorists define documentary ...... 95 4.1.4 Historical survey scoping ...... 98 4.1.5 Chapter outline ...... 98

4.2 1890s–1910s: Archaeological actualitès ...... 100

4.2.1 The Lumières and Les Pyramides ...... 100 4.2.2 The Edison Company and Sakkarah ...... 104 4.2.3 The Warwick Trading Company and the Stonehenge Panorama ...... 105 4.2.4 Archaeology actualitès and modern audiences ...... 108 4.2.5 Setting the scene for archaeology documentaries ...... 112

4.3 1910s–1920s: Non-fiction filmmaking thrives ...... 113

4.3.1 The rise of newsreels ...... 114 4.3.2 Howard Carter and Tutankhamun in the media ...... 115 4.3.3 First Peeps of the opening of TUT-ANKH AMEN’S TOMB ...... 117 4.3.4 Harry Burton and Tutankhamun ...... 123 4.3.5 Alexander Keiller and Windmill Hill ...... 128 4.3.6 Burton, Keiller, and the archaeology lecture film ...... 134 4.3.7 Meanwhile, the documentary genre takes form ...... 138

4.4 1935: Together at last – the earliest known archaeology documentary and its influences ...... 141

4.4.1 The Soviet avant-garde movement ...... 141 4.4.2 British documentary movement ...... 143 4.4.3 Henri Storck and early Belgian documentary ...... 146 4.4.4 Henri Lavachery and the Rapa Nui Expedition ...... 149 4.4.5 L’Île de Pâques: The earliest known archaeology documentary ...... 151 4.4.6 Archaeology finds its voice ...... 158 4.4.7 1930s–1940s: Archaeology’s budding filmmakers ...... 164

4.5 Concluding thoughts ...... 166

Chapter 5 Off the historical record II : archaeology and documentary filmmaking between the 1950s and 2010s ...... 167

5.1 Introduction ...... 167

iii

5.2 Chapter outline ...... 167 5.3 The Kon-Tiki expedition ...... 168

5.3.1 Thor Heyerdahl, Olle Nordemar, and Kon-Tiki ...... 170 5.3.2 Kon-Tiki as a documentary film ...... 178 5.3.3 Kon-Tiki as a media strategy ...... 186 5.3.4 Kon-Tiki’s impact on archaeology ...... 192 5.3.5 Kon-Tiki’s impact on Polynesians ...... 196 5.3.6 The enduring popularity – and parodying – of Kon-Tiki ...... 201 5.3.7 Concluding thoughts ...... 204

5.4 Documentary in the late 1950s and 1960s ...... 204 5.5 Archaeology and factual TV ...... 207

5.5.1 Television and the “taming” of documentary ...... 207 5.5.2 1930s–2010s: Archaeology embraces factual TV ...... 212 5.5.3 Benefits of factual TV for archaeology ...... 216 5.5.4 Drawbacks of factual TV for archaeology ...... 218

5.6 Documentary is dead, long live documentary ...... 224

5.6.1 A digital renaissance ...... 229 5.6.2 Brent Huffman and Saving Mes Aynak ...... 231 5.6.3 Beyond the gimmick: archaeology storytelling becomes interactive ...... 236

5.7 Digital futures and the archaeology documentary ...... 239 5.8 Concluding thoughts ...... 244

Chapter 6 Autoethnography ...... 247

6.1 Introduction ...... 247 6.2 Case study design and method of analysis ...... 248

6.2.1 Case study aims ...... 248 6.2.2 Case study objectives ...... 249 6.2.3 From ethnography to autoethnography ...... 249 6.2.4 Case study scope ...... 252 6.2.5 Method of case study data collection ...... 253 6.2.6 Case study ethics, anonymisation, and data protection ...... 254

6.3 Autoethnography: Hitting Record ...... 255

iv

6.3.1 Prelude ...... 255 6.3.2 Tread gently ...... 255 6.3.3 Tech-check ...... 261 6.3.4 The inscribed pot ...... 262 6.3.5 A visit from Delve-TV ...... 266 6.3.6 Sick and tired ...... 269 6.3.7 Not best practice ...... 271 6.3.8 A moment of rest ...... 273 6.3.9 Wrapped ...... 274 6.3.10 Hiatus ...... 274 6.3.11 Logging ...... 276 6.3.12 Assemblage ...... 279 6.3.13 Rough-cut ...... 280 6.3.14 Editing consultations ...... 282 6.3.15 Fine-cut ...... 288 6.3.16 Coda...... 290

6.4 Concluding thoughts ...... 296

Chapter 7 Conclusion ...... 299 Appendices ...... 305 Archaeology documentary typologies as proposed by archaeologists between 1958-2014...... 307 Off the Record Survey (2016) –Questionnaire ...... 311 Off the Record Survey (2016) – Graphic Summary of Findings ...... 329 Nichols’ Documentary Film Modes and Models ...... 341

D.1 Nichols’ Documentary Film Modes ...... 342 D.2 Nichols’ Documentary Film Models ...... 343

‘Excavations at Neolithic Site of Windmill Hill Near Avebury’ transcript (1925)...... 345 Glossary of Terms ...... 351 List of References ...... 355 List of Film References ...... 389 Bibliography ...... 401

v

vi

List of Tables

Table 1.1: Comparison of previous public archaeology research showing % of archaeology audiences according to source ...... 2

Table 2.1: Archaeology documentary as a ‘sub-genre’ of documentary, with its own typologies ...... 11

Table 2.2: Bonnachi’s Audience Experience Categories: Types and Meanings ...... 16

Table 7.1: Archaeology documentary typologies as proposed by archaeologists between 1958-2014 ...... 308

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List of Figures

Figure 2.1: Bonnachi’s Audience Experience Types: by amounts (after Bonnachi 2013: 124...... 16

Figure 2.2: Kulik’s model of archaeologists’ communication pathways ...... 19

Figure 3.1: Respondent Age by Percentage ...... 65

Figure 3.2: Respondent Gender by Percentage ...... 65

Figure 3.3: Respondent Location by Percentage ...... 66

Figure 3.4: Respondent Ethnicity by Percentage ...... 66

Figure 3.5: Respondent Highest Level of Qualifications by Percentage ...... 66

Figure 3.6: Main Sector of Archaeological Employment by Percentage ...... 67

Figure 3.7: How many archaeology documentary productions overall have you participated in, in the last 10 years? ...... 67

Figure 3.8: When was the last time you took part in the production of an archaeology documentary? ...... 68

Figure 3.9: On average, how much time each year do you estimate that you spend working on or with archaeology documentary productions? ...... 68

Figure 3.10: What roles have you had in archaeology documentary productions? ...... 69

Figure 3.11: What stage of archaeology documentary production have you most often taken part in? ...... 69

Figure 3.12: What type of archaeology documentary productions have you most often been part of? ...... 70

Figure 3.13: NVivo generated word cloud of ‘negative’ single-word answers given ...... 71

Figure 3.14: Comparison of rates of review and editorial rights respondents have when participating in productions ...... 76

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Figure 3.15: Comparison of opinions on review and editorial rights respondents feel they ‘should’ have in productions ...... 77

Figure 3.16: Comparison of respondents’ opinions on their own media literacy; and on documentarists' archaeological literacy ...... 81

Figure 3.17: Respondent views on the need for media training and support 81

Figure 3.18: NVivo generated word cloud of ‘positive’ single-word answers given ...... 82

Figure 3.19: Respondent opinion on the benefit of 'celebrity' archaeologists83

Figure 3.20: NVivo generated word cloud of 50 most common words mentioned in answer to an archaeology documentary’s purpose ...... 84

Figure 3.21: NVivo generated word cloud of 50 most common words mentioned in answer to motives for participation ...... 86

Figure 3.22: Comparison of respondent views on accuracy and fairness in archaeology documentary representation ...... 90

Figure 4.1: Invitation to the “Exhibition of Antiquities from Lachish Palestine, at Wellcome Research Institute in London...... 137

Figure 5.1: Kon-Tiki branding and promotions ...... 189

Figure 5.2: Danish Kon-Tiki poster featuring a photograph of Reasin in bottom left corner ...... 198

Figure 6.1: Cheesy Director by Vicki Herring (Everill 2012: Figure 25)...... 260

x

List of Stills

Still 2.1: Stills from Cave of Forgotten Dreams showing the archaeological map of Chauvet cave, based on the laser scans made by the archaeology project...... 13

Still 2.2: Photography by Piccini of the view across James’ desk towards Bens, showing the archaeological "assemblage” of Time Team 22

Still 2.3: Filming the video recording diaries at the BACH project at Çatalhöyük ...... 28

Still 2.4: Çatalhöyük Research Project BACH Area Excavation video interface ...... 29

Still 2.5: Çatalhöyük video BA2_25_8, labelled as: “Reporter: Ruth Tringham; Tuesday August 25th 1998; Space 86” ...... 29

Still 2.6: Çatalhöyük video “Priority Unit 31578”, Building 132, Space 531”29

Still 2.7: Screenshot of CatDV video catalogue of BACH video records at Çatalhöyük ...... 30

Still 2.8: PATINA filmmaking in process ...... 31

Still 2.9: Photograph showing two PATINA participants using Synote to access, watch, and annotate their videos at the Portus project 32

Still 2.10: Archaeologists interpret a bone artefact, as filmed by a PATINA participant ...... 32

Stills 2.11: Stills from Guttersnipe, with which Piccini questions archaeology’s boundaries through her “creative treatment of actuality” (Piccini, 2009, Permissions needed)...... 45

Stills 2.12: Stills from Map Your Bristol and Know Your Bristol ...... 47

Still 2.13: Stills from On the Move Video Blog ...... 48

Still 4.1: Les Pyramides (Vue Général): the opening scene shows the Sphinx of Giza...... 101

Still 4.2: Les Pyramides (Vue Général): the scene transforms when people begin to move across the frame...... 101

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Still 4.3: Descente de la grande pyramide: men climbing down the steps of the pyramid...... 102

Still 4.4: The dual projector and camera, Cinématographe Lumière, as displayed at the Institut Lumière, Lyon...... 102

Still 4.5: Stonehenge – Panorama of the Ancient Druidical Remains: the first pan, towards the right, features a policeman...... 106

Still 4.6: Stonehenge - Panorama: the second pan, towards the left, features a woman...... 106

Still 4.7: Stonehenge – Panorama: showing stones 21 (standing, left), and 22 (fallen, centre)...... 107

Still 4.8: Photograph of Thomas Tally's travelling Electric Theatre, Los Angeles, 1902...... 109

Still 4.9: Photograph of audience at The Palladium Cinema, London, circa 1913...... 111

Still 4.10: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: Howard Carter can be seen in the centre ...... 117

Still 4.11: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: a hastily and illicitly captured shot of an entrance to a tomb...... 118

Still 4.12: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: part of a sequence featuring the ebony chair being carried out of the tomb...... 119

Still 4.13: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: the ebony chair passing again, this time close to camera...... 121

Still 4.14: Tutankhamun’s childhood chair...... 121

Still 4.15: Newsreel of an archaeological excavation of a skeleton used by Storck in Histoire Du Soldat Inconnu ...... 146

Stills 4.16: Scenes from Misère au Borinage documenting the working conditions and living spaces of the Borinage miners and their families...... 147

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Stills 4.17: Scene from Misère au Borinage contrasting the building of a new Church with the surrounding impoverished accommodation of the Borinage families ...... 148

Still 4.18: John Fernhout precariously balanced in his pursuit of the perfect shot, during the 1934-35 expedition to Rapa Nui ...... 151

Stills 4.19: Sequence introducing the Moai in L’Île de Pâques...... 153

Stills 4.20: Deconstructing the Moai montage in L’Île de Pâques...... 154

Still 4.21: Scene in L’Île de Pâques contrasting the austere Catholic Church at Hanga Roa with the (so-narrated) “shabbily dressed” children in the foreground. The scene has clear parallels with Misère au Borinage (Fonds Henri Storck/ Rapa Nui Council)(Permission pending). 155

Still 4.22: A sombre sequence profiling the leper colony in L’Île de Pâques...... 156

Still 4.23: Comparison of Lavachery’s Plate V photograph (1936) (left), and L’Île de Pâques opening scene (right)...... 159

Stills 4.24: Sequence near end of L’Île de Pâques showing the removal of Hanga Oné Oné ...... 161

Still 5.1: The image of the raft as captured in the film, bearing the Kon-Tiki motif in the centre of its sail ...... 169

Still 5.2: Heyerdahl receives top billing in Kon-Tiki’s opening titles ..... 170

Still 5.3: Queues extending out the door at the American premier of Kon- Tiki, 1950 ...... 171

Still 5.4: The Kon-Tiki Academy Award as a signifier of authorship ...... 172

Still 5.5: The Bell and Howell 16-mm camera used to film Kon-Tiki ...... 174

Still 5.6: Spot the difference: “three” of the killer whales featured in Kon-Tiki ...... 179

Still 5.7: Heyerdahl cast as Con Tiki Viracocha...... 181

Still 5.8: The Kon-Tiki crew planting a coconut on their landing site, performatively fulfilling the Kon-Tiki thesis (NRK)...... 182

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Stills 5.9: The Kon-Tiki crew performing Heyerdahl’s thesis: (top) Heyerdahl and Tupuhoe plant Peruvian plants together; (bottom left) Heyerdahl explains the gourd to the Polynesians; (bottom right) the Norwegian flag looms over the proceedings (NRK)...... 183

Still 5.10: Heyerdahl, wearing a woven crown, operates on Huamata (NRK)...... 184

Still 5.11: The ubiquitous, bearded, Kon-Tiki motif is the final image the audience are shown ...... 185

Still 5.12: Huamata and his mother [name not given] after the surgery, in the final part of Kon-Tiki (NRK)...... 186

Still 5.13: Opening intertitles from Kon-Tiki (1950) cross-promoting Heyerdahl's popular book ...... 189

Still 5.15: Liv Heyerdahl examining human remains on Fatu Hiva...... 197

Stills 5.16: Parodying Kon-Tiki in The Goodies: “For Those in Peril on the Sea” (1973) ...... 203

Stills 5.17: Stills from Kon Tika Masala (2013), in which the red beard of Kon- Tiki returns ...... 204

Still 5.18: Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Dr Swinton and Professor Bodkin attempt to identify the skull of a woolly rhinoceros in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral ...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Still 5.19: Behind the scenes: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral in Lime Grove studio, London...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Still 5.20: Wheeler and Daniel try drinking mead, replicating Tollund Man's final meal for Buried Treasure audiences in 'Peat Bog Murder Mystery' ...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Stills 5.21: Comparison of documentary visual storytelling devices in Factual TV ...... 220

Still 5.22: Production still of women surveying and digging in search of the remains of their loved ones in the Atacama Desert, in Nostalgia de la Luz (2010) ...... 225

xiv

Still 5.23: Production still of co-directors Andrew Pike and Ann McGrath with National Parks Ranger Ernie Mitchell surveying at Lake Mungo, in Message From Mungo (2014) ...... 226

Still 5.24: Production still: David Lebrun filming interviews with former looters Jose Luis Morales and Ramon Peralta for Out of the Maya Tombs ...... 227

Still 5.25: Production still showing inscription being salvaged in Agelastros Petros (2000) ...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Still 5.26: View of The Drift installation at Chisenhale Gallery, 2017 ..... 228

Still 5.27: Production still of the opening of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, from Das Grosse Museum (2014) ...... 228

Stills 5.28: Saving Mes Aynak production stills, some with social media branding ...... 231

Still 5.29: Web interface of Palestine Remix ...... 237

Still 5.30: Production still from In Limbo, showing interview segment with futurist Ray Kurzweil (2015) ...... 238

Stills 5.31: Comparison of Les Pyramides (1897) as experienced by viewers today ...... 241

Still 5.32: Digital panoramic image created in 2018 by James Miles from the original Stonehenge – Panorama (1901) (Compare with stills 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7) ...... 242

Still 6.1: Assemblage 1 of the edit in Avid media composer ...... 280

Still 6.2: Rough Cut 13, in Avid Media Composer ...... 281

Still 6.3: Comparison of perspectives on the editing process ...... 284

Still 6.4: Online edit: applying colour corrections to each clip ...... 288

Still 6.5: Exporting the Picture Lock from Avid ...... 288

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Academic Thesis: Declaration of Authorship

I, Kathryn Elizabeth Rogers declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are my own and has been generated by me as the result of my own original research.

Off the Record: Archaeology and Documentary Filmmaking

I confirm that:

1. This work was done wholly or mainly while in candidature for a research degree at this University; 2. Where any part of this thesis has previously been submitted for a degree or any other qualification at this University or any other institution, this has been clearly stated; 3. Where I have consulted the published work of others, this is always clearly attributed; 4. Where I have quoted from the work of others, the source is always given. With the exception of such quotations, this thesis is entirely my own work; 5. I have acknowledged all main sources of help; 6. Where the thesis is based on work done by myself jointly with others, I have made clear exactly what was done by others and what I have contributed myself; 7. None of this work has been published before submission:

Signed:

Date: 26 September 2019

xvii

Acknowledgements

Words cannot express just how grateful I am to have been granted the opportunity to undertake this study, and in doing so, to hopefully make a worthy contribution to archaeological thought and practice. To paraphrase Australian wheelchair racer and Para-Olympian Kurt Fearnley: like racing, writing a thesis often feels like a solitary endeavour, where you spend most of your time with your head down and focus tight. It can be a surprise when you finally stop to look up (and look back), and realise a lot of people have come along with you on the journey. Like all research then, this thesis is the culmination of not only 4+ years of study, but a lifetime of lessons, moral support, and the generosity of others.

Firstly, I would like to express my thanks to the hundreds of survey and case study participants who gave their time to partake in this research - I hope my research has proved a worthy account of your contributions. I am grateful also to the institutions who have kindly allowed me access to their collections of the course of my research and/or have advised or consulted with me during my research, including the Alexander Keiller Museum, the Foundation Henri Storck, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Film Institute, CODEIPA Rapa Nui, Fatu Hiva CODIM, and the film production companies whose work I discuss.

My thanks also go to the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton who helped fund my doctoral research through the Vice Chancellors’ Award, the Brumfit- Mitchell Post-Graduate Award, and the various travel and seminar grants awarded. Without such financial support this research truly would not have been possible.

I am of course indebted to my family, especially my Nan Lesly Gorbach, my sister Vicky Russell, and my mother Beth Rogers, whose shared love for history and stories of the past inspired my own from the moment I could read the old encyclopaedias stacked by Nan’s TV. Thank you to Graham McLennan and my other high-school teachers at Hawker College, who cemented in me a scholarly love of history, anthropology, archaeology, and archival research, and helped me first find my voice as a scholar. Thank you also to all my undergraduate archaeology and history lecturers at the Australian National University and Simon Fraser University, especially those that gave me a second chance when life complicated studies: Professor Peter Hiscock, Dr Gail Higginbottom, Dr Mark Dawson, Dr Dimitris Krallis, and Elise Chenier. When my As turned to Fs you helped me turn them back to As, and in doing so taught me both the gift of resilience, and that I was worth more than a grade. I also have many warm memories of and gratitude for my documentary lecturers Dr Steve Thomas and Shannon Owen, my classmates, and everyone at the School of Film

xix

and Television at Victorian College of the Arts, who instilled in me a deep love and respect for all forms of filmmaking, and taught me to always “dig deeper”.

I will never be able to say thank you enough to Rob Paton, who first put a camcorder in my hand at an archaeology field school at Lake Mungo, gave me my first job in consultant archaeology, suggested Dicken’s Hard Times as an archaeology text, encouraged and supported me throughout my Masters studies, and without who’s generosity and moral support I would never have even entertained the prospect of pursuing a doctorate, let alone been able to move across the planet to do it.

I am filled with gratitude for my wonderful primary supervisor Professor Stephanie Moser, who saw me through thick and thin, and either held my hand or kicked my arse when I needed it. I can only hope to one day be as generous and sage a mentor as you. My thanks go also to my second and third supervisors Dr Michael Williams and Dr Sophia Bull, who welcomed me warmly into the School of Film at University of Southampton, and to Dr Chris Moreh who kindly advised me on the Off the Record survey design. Thank you also to all my academic mentors present and past, including Professor Emeritus Isabel McBryde, Professor Emeritus Clive Gamble, Dr Elaine Morris, Professor Joanna Sofaer, and Jan Harrison who all gave their time to support me with generosity, kindness, and wisdom. My thanks also extend to all the staff in the archaeology department at the University of Southampton, who have been incredibly welcoming and supportive of me throughout my studies, sharing films, ideas, and many opportunities to grow professionally and as a person. Equally, to the School of Humanities staff who supported me and my research in more ways than I can ever know.

I am indebted also to my brilliant GP Dr Sarah Armstrong, and the nurses, doctors, and staff at University Health Service, Victoria House at Southampton General Hospital, the Royal Hants Hospital, and the NHS. You literally saved my life. Without you this thesis would just be pixels on a forgotten laptop.

I am thankful to my friends who all at one time or another were there for me when I needed them, particularly Ammandeep Mahal, Matt Gawthrop, Tyra Standen, Camilla Moore, Dr Rachel Bynoe, Natalie Cunningham, Debbie Hiscock, and Trista West. I am especially thankful to Dr Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz and Dr Chris Elmer who dedicated time to read my thesis drafts and give feedback.

Most of all I am thankful to my husband Dr James Miles who has been my true pillar in surviving and completing this thesis. If nothing else comes of this Ph.D., it will still have been worth it, because in doing it I met you, which is worth more to me than any title, or award, or job in the world.

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Definitions and Abbreviations

ABC: Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

AFI: American Film Institute.

AIATSIS: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

AR: Augmented reality.

BACH: Berkley Archaeology at Çatalhöyük Integrative Archival Diary (US).

BAFTA: British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation.

BFI: British Film Institute.

CHAMP: Cultural Heritage and Archaeological Media Project.

CIfA: Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (UK).

DSLR: Digital single-lens reflex camera.

DVD: Digital Video Disc (for recording video).

FHS: Foundation Henri Storck (Belgium). iDoc: Interactive documentary.

ITV: Independent Television (UK).

KYBOTM: Know Your Bristol on the Move project (UK).

MYB: Map Your Bristol project (UK).

NITV: National Indigenous Television (Australia).

NLE: Non-linear Editing System.

NRK: Norsk Rikskringkasting (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation).

NTB: Norwegian News Agency.

PATINA: Personal Architectonic Through Interaction with Artefacts (UK).

PDM: Image is in the ‘Public Domain’.

RKO: Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures (USA film production and distribution company).

ULK: University of Local Knowledge.

UNESCO: United National Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation.

VCR: Video Cassette Recorder.

VHS: Video Home System (magnetic tape cassettes for recording video).

Vlog: Video blog.

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VOD: Video on Demand.

VR: Virtual reality.

xxii Chapter 1

Chapter 1 Introduction

In writing a problem down or in airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise.

Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (in Dunleavy 2003: 1).

1.1 Introduction

Archaeologists have long expressed frustrations with portrayals of archaeology by the documentary genre, contending that filmmakers and programme makers sensationalise, dumb-down, and mis-represent the study of the material past on screen. Yet, while we demand that “the media” broadly speaking, and “documentary” more specifically, should understand and represent our discipline in all its complexity, we must ask ourselves: are we willing to do the same in return? Despite almost a century of archaeological commentary about archaeology documentaries, the bulk of critique has been relegated to the fringes of archaeological discourse, written and published by archaeologists in the forms of letters to the editor, newsletter articles, film reviews, anecdotal commentaries, and personal reflections. Only a handful of academic studies have directly and methodically investigated this relationship, and while these offer genuine depth and insight, they remain few and far between. Consequently, the discourse has fallen short of advancing the kind of informed and constructive debate necessary to attain a meaningful and useful understanding of the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. The purpose of this thesis is not to merely interject into this discourse but to reset the agenda by profiling, problematizing, and reframing how archaeologists understand the relationship between the discipline of archaeology and the practice of documentary filmmaking within a UK context. At a time when digital technologies of filmmaking, archiving, and distribution are ushering in new opportunities, challenges, and indeed risks for archaeology and documentary alike, now is a timely moment to pause, take stock, and reconsider what and how we desire the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking to be.

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1.2 Previous research

The importance of television for communicating archaeology to public audiences is well established. Previous research seeking to identify the most popular methods for communicating archaeology have demonstrated that television easily rivals and in some cases is preferred by audiences to visiting museums, visiting heritage sites, attending public lectures, and reading printed publications, as evident in Table 1.1.

% Percentage of audiences per source for accessing archaeology

Population

Researchers and

sample

Country Museum visits Television Film Travel/ visits Site Books Magazines Newspapers Education System Public Lectures Events

Pokotylo & n. 963 9.2- 57.5 54.5 9 36.7 24.3 23.6 11.1 2.9 - Guppy Residents of 20.5 (1999) Canada Vancouver, BC

Ramos & n. 1016 - 56 - - 33 33 24 10-23 1 2

Duganne USA Residents of (2000) Rochester, NY

Merriman n. 1500 7 16 - 19-20 14 - - - 12 - (2000) UK Residents of UK

Balme & n. 119 13 57* 7 57* 7/12† 12† - Wilson Perth based archaeology Australia (2004) undergraduates

n. 39 Colley Sydney based 0 23* 15 23* - 46‡ - - (2005) archaeology Australia Undergraduates

Table 1.1: Comparison of previous public archaeology research showing % of archaeology audiences according to source (* Mass or popular media have been categorised by original researchers as a single source. † Tertiary education and university lectures have been categorised by Balme and Wilson as one source. ‡ Colley differentiates ‘school study’ (31%) from tertiary education (15%)).

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As well as popularity, the significant audience reach and demographic diversity of archaeology television programmes has also been profiled by archaeologists. At its peak in 2001 British factual series Coast (2005-2015) and Time Team (1994 - 2014) attracted averages of 3.5 million domestic viewers each episode (Piccini and Kulik 2007c: 57; Bailey 2012: 274). Such a large television audience reach for archaeology was purportedly established decades earlier when BBC’s factual series Buried Treasure (1954 - 1959) pulled in an estimated 5 million viewers in its first year of broadcast, allegedly 11% of the then-UK population (according to BBC statistics, Daniel 1954: 206). Such one-off instances of audience reach evidently maintained over half a century, vastly overshadows that of that other more esteemed communicator of archaeology: museums. For example, the British Museum’s 5.8 million visitors across the entirety of 2017/18 seems almost paltry in comparison to the 10 million viewers who tuned in to watch the 90-minute BBC docudrama Pompeii: The Last Day (2003), and likewise for the 9 million viewers of the 60-minute Pyramid (2002) (BM Annual Report 2018: 19; Piccini and Kulik 2007). The fact that BAME (‘black and minority ethnic’), socially disadvantaged, and lower socio-economic groups have been shown to be increasingly more engaged with 'TV heritage' and film, while simultaneously being unlikely to attend museums and heritage sites, also underscores the crucial role of non-fiction television in making archaeology accessible to diverse public audience (Neelands et al. 2015: 33-34; Piccini 2007a: 8; see also Kulik 2006: 76). Added to this, archaeology in television and film also carries the weight of archaeologists’ expectations that this audience reach might translate into various tangible benefits to the discipline, such as: promoting archaeological values in a public sphere, influencing the professionalisation of the discipline (Perry 2011; 2014; 2015; Moser 2009; 2012; 2014a), funding archaeological research (Daniel 1954: 204; Sutcliffe et al. 1978; Jordan 1981: 211; Kulik 2005; Perry 2011; Schablitsky and Hetherington 2012: 147-8; Thornton 2013), and recruiting archaeology students (Jordan 1982: 213; Ascherson 2004: 156; Holtorf 2005; Colley 2005: 57; Taylor 2007: 94; Schablitsky and Hetherington 2012: 144-8; Everill 2006; 2012; Melville 2014: 6513; Bailey 2014: 7258).

Evidently, the stakes in archaeology’s relationship to the media are high. There have subsequently been many calls within archaeology to better understand media production processes and to critically explore archaeology’s relationship with the media (Kraemer 1958: 266; Bealy and Healy 1975: 896; Moberg 1985: 75; Nichols 2006: 45; Van Dyke 2008; Ferguson 2006: 372; Silberman 2008: 176; Holtorf 2008: 178; Cline 2008: 179; Bonnachi 2013: 129; Morgan 2014: 340).

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Particularly pertinent to this thesis, Karol Kulik has suggested that archaeologists and media practitioners should be surveyed about their attitudes towards and experiences of archaeological communication (2005: 274d); and Angela Piccini has repeatedly called for ethnographic research into the contexts and audience consumption of heritage media (1993: 23; 1996: S108; 1999: 240; 2007a: 10; 2007b: 234).

More broadly, within the wider discourses of representation and public archaeology, there are further calls for archaeologists to problematise how visualisations and images such as documentaries are used to produce archaeological knowledge (Perry 2011:315; Perry 2015: 203; Smiles and Moser 2005: 2); while Shanks and Webmoor entreat archaeologists to consider the political economy of archaeological media, particularly "the conditions of conception, manufacture, distribution, consumption and curation or discard" of archaeological images and text (2010: 108). Beyond archaeology, Hargreaves and Ferguson have lamented the shortage of case studies within science communication and recommend that a critical examination of the merits of television and multimedia representations of science is necessary (2001: 63). Despite their clear importance to archaeology however, archaeology documentaries whether on television or film remain largely under-examined and little theorised, set firmly at a distance away from archaeological practice and discourse (see Piccini 1996: S90; Smiles and Moser 2005: 6; Perry 2011: 315). In particular, the few attempts to directly and critically explore the modes of production of archaeology documentaries either appear to have been cut short (e.g. Piccini 2014), or rely on retrospective or historical examples (e.g. Kulik 2005; Perry 2011).

In this this thesis I seek to address this gap in knowledge by undertaking a broad, exploratory investigation of the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking, via adopting a mixed-method approach combining sociological, historical, and ethnographic research methods. Only once we situate documentary’s place in archaeology, and archaeology’s place in documentary, can we begin to critically explore this relationship in a meaningful way.

1.3 My contribution

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking from three differing angles, each arguably the first comprehensive

4 Chapter 1 body of evidence of its kind: a survey of archaeologist’s recent experiences of and attitudes towards documentary; a historical exploration of archaeology’s expression in non-fiction filmmaking and the documentary genre, from the beginning of cinema through to the 21st century; and an autoethnographic account of an archaeology documentary production as experienced from the filmmaker’s perspective. These three new lenses upon the relationship between the two fields are contextualised and analysed with aligned research in archaeology and documentary film studies. Throughout the thesis I examine and challenge how archaeologists understand and define archaeology documentaries, and the parts we play in their production.

1.4 Central research question

What is the nature of the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking?

1.5 Scope of study

For the sake of feasibility, where possible I have focused my study within a UK context, as the UK is one of the most prolific production zones for archaeology on non-fiction screens with an established history of archaeology broadcasting and public viewership, making the UK a useful starting place for exploring the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. That said, in acknowledgement that documentaries are often produced and have an impact across geographic boundaries, and out of respect to the many superb archaeology documentary films made outside the UK, at times I find it necessary to include works from other countries, regions, and languages, both as exemplars of the form, and for comparison to the UK context.

What is not included in this thesis are other types of archaeological communications that are fundamentally different to documentary in purpose and process. As such, critiques of fictional representations of archaeology in animations, television, film and cinema are excluded (for more on fictional representations see Bryan 1924; Day 1997; Hall 2004; Stern 2007; Schablitsky 2007; Marwick 2010; and Hiscock 2012; 2014). Whilst discussions of film distribution pathways such as archaeological film festivals (Beaudry and Elster 1979) and social media (Perry and Beale 2015; Perry et. al. 2015) have been made previously and deserve further attention, for the sake of expediency, distribution

5 Chapter 1 pathways are also excluded from this research. Discussions about the preservation and usefulness of archival film footage for archaeological research purposes, particularly the work of the Filming Antiquity team (2019), Watkins (2013), Dixon (2013), Thornton (2016), and Wiltshire (2017), raise enticing questions for the potential reams of archaeologically relevant documentary celluloid footage and VHS tapes decaying in attics but regrettably, this thesis can only touch briefly on this promising field of research. Archaeology in computer and video games has been explored by Morgan (2017), and archaeology in other dramatic and performative forms such as theatre has been addressed most notably by Pearson and Shanks (2001). Experimental 'excavations' of film media such as cameras and digital storage technologies such as hard-drives, treated as archaeological objects in their own right, opens a fresh take on the intersection of archaeology with media, but again is excluded from this research (see Perry and Morgan 2015; Piccini 2014). Finally, to do the subject under study justice, this thesis also restricts itself to the context of modes of media productions and critiquing final products. Thus, critical analysis of audience reception, although not excluded, is not a central focus of this research (for more on this topic see Moser 1998, 2001, 2009, 2012, 2014b; Kulik 2005; Piccini 1999; Bonnachi 2013).

1.6 Thesis outline

The next chapter of this thesis comprises a critical survey of the archaeological literature exploring the current state of knowledge about archaeology documentaries as understood from an archaeological perspective. I have divided the archaeological discourse on filmmaking into four schools of thought pertaining to filmmaking, as: 1. dissemination; 2. mediation; 3. scientific record; and 4. creative and collaborative community praxes. In this chapter I problematise archaeologists’ definitions of and assumptions about archaeology documentaries, and the many calls to “take back” archaeology from the media, and instead propose that solutions to archaeology’s concerns about the genre and its processes can be found within film and documentary practice and scholarship.

Chapter Three investigates the past decade of the relationship between British archaeology and British documentary filmmaking. In this chapter I present the data, analysis, and findings of a questionnaire-based survey profiling British archaeologists’ engagement with and attitudes towards archaeology documentary

6 Chapter 1 filmmaking between 2006 and 2016. I question assumptions that there is a singular narrative of this relationship, and suggest that taking part in filmmaking should be considered a professional archaeological activity and form of expertise.

The fourth and fifth chapters present a new history of archaeology documentary filmmaking through time, liminally positioned between the histories of modern archaeology, and non-fiction and documentary filmmaking. I explore how archaeology in non-fiction film is more diverse in style and content than previously recognised – from 1890s actualitès, to Oscar winning documentary films, to factual TV, to iDocs – and I examine the changing nature of archaeological authorship across these media. I contend that documentary filmmaking has played a far more significant role in the history and development of archaeology than previously acknowledged, a role this thesis only begins to uncover.

The sixth and final chapter takes this study deeper by presenting and critically analysing an autoethnographic account of the production of a British archaeological documentary film, as told from the filmmaker’s perspective (my own). Based on a regularly kept field-diary, cross-checked against documentary evidence, and analysed using grounded theory, in this first-hand account I seek to not only to provide insight into the technical and creative processes of documentary filmmaking, but to problematise how documentary filmmaking works in an archaeological context, from a filmmaker’s perspective.

The overall purpose of this thesis is not to merely interject into the discourse on archaeology’s relationship to documentary filmmaking (and indeed the wider media landscape) but to reset the agenda on the subject by reframing how archaeologists understand the relationship between archaeology as a discipline and the practice of documentary filmmaking. By identifying and interrogating the instances of confusion, unease, and conflict that arise when these two fields converge, as well as those instances of shared benefit and similitude, through this thesis I seek to cultivate a space for critical awareness, mutual respect, and shared intellectual and creative growth.

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Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Literature Review

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!

Mr Gradgrind, Hard Times (Dickens 1854: 9).

2.1 Introduction

This chapter explores what archaeologists have said on the subject of archaeology’s relationship to the documentary genre, focusing primarily on the United Kingdom during the past decade. Problematically, although there are some academic publications on the topic, most of this discourse occurs on the fringes of academic publishing, personally expressed by archaeologists in the front matter of journals, articles in popular magazines, and as film or television reviews. Archaeology’s hesitancy to engage intellectually with documentary as a topic of study appears to be part of a larger trend of archaeologists’ dismissive attitudes towards visualisations of archaeology more generally. As Moser has observed, “popular” and visual representations in archaeology are regularly side- lined to the field of “public archaeology,” and archaeologists only tend to engage with images of the past “as a source of amusement, or when some great injustice has been done in the portrayal of a particular ancestor or site” (2001: 263-4; Moser and Smiles 2005: 6; 2009: 3). As Perry also points out (2011: 21; 2015: 199), in the rare instances when academic publishing does critically discuss documentary filmmaking in archaeology, such works are commonly relegated to short sub-sections of academic articles or brief, almost tokenistic, final chapters in monographs, again under the auspices of ‘public archaeology’ or some such derivation – perpetuating the false dichotomy of “public” versus “academic” archaeologies, “popular” versus “intellectual”, high culture versus low, knowledge creation versus consumption, and so on. This overall dearth of academic inquiry into this subject leaves archaeologists effectively chasing our tails when it comes to understanding the relationship between archaeology as a discipline and archaeology documentaries. Ignorant of the existing archaeological, media and

9 Chapter 2 film scholarship available to us, we risk repeating fallacious arguments and rehashing exhausted debates which were not necessarily credible to begin with, often without evidence to support our assertions.

To most effectively review this topic then, we must cast our nets wide beyond the usual academic tomes. For reasons that will come apparent, we must also step back slightly from focusing on documentary as a genre, to more broadly consider how archaeologists have approached non-fiction filmmaking and television production as well. It is through archaeologists’ reviews, editorials, and personal accounts of our experiences participating in documentary that we begin to understand the parameters we expect of our relationship with documentary, the gaps in our knowledge, and the consequences of these gaps. It is also in our own non-fiction filmmaking projects (whether following scientific or creative aims), that we can begin to see if, how, and when archaeological motives, concerns, and expertise align or conflict with that of documentary and its practitioners.

2.2 How archaeologists define archaeology documentaries

A recurring obstacle that has hindered our understanding of the relationship between archaeology and documentary is the question of how best to define and categorize the term: ‘archaeology documentary’. Yet without sensible parameters, no critique or account of any archaeology documentary production can proceed. To this end, archaeologists have repeatedly attempted to establish their own definitions and categories of archaeology documentaries as a sub-genre of documentary as can be seen in Table 2.1 (see Appendix A for more details).

Yet whilst the terminology is similar to documentary scholarship and practice, none of these definitions or approaches to categorisation have gained traction within archaeology, nor do they prove serviceable from a documentary film scholarship or practice perspective. The following chapter explores how – despite the clear importance of the documentary genre to archaeology – there remains remarkably little archaeological understanding of archaeology documentary filmmaking, films, and its relevant scholarship.

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Kraemer Laude1 Beale and Healy Kulik Morgan Schablitsky Researcher(s) 1958 1970 1975 2006 2014 2012; 2014 and year USA France USA UK UK US Approach to According to the film’s According to the According to the subject According to the format According to the film’s typologies n/a perceived purpose audience matter or representational style purpose and qualities (if given) Sample size 12 n/a 170 590 9 n/a Site specific Expository documentary Traditional Educational film Specialist Audiences documentary Expository documentary film documentary Inspirational film General Audiences General syntheses Direct Testimonial film Host-based formula

Problem or question- Detective Impressionistic Documentary - - oriented film Essay documentary documentary Backstage documentary Phenomenological Typologies of Training film - Methodology film - How-to documentary archaeological film Experimental/ archaeology documentaries Interpretative film - Reconstruction - - ethnographic study

Table 2.1: Archaeology documentary as a ‘sub-genre’ of documentary, with its own typologies (arranged to show similarities), as proposed by archaeologists between 1958-2014.2

1 1970, translated by and cited in Beale and Healy 1975. 2 See Appendix C Table 7.1 for further details and examples.

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2.3 Archaeological perspectives on cinematic documentaries

A telling example of archaeology’s disengagement from documentary thought, is Edeltraud Aspöck's 2012 review of Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), published in the European Journal of Archaeology. Aspöck’s review illustrates not only what she conceives archaeology documentaries to be – or what she believes they should be – but is indicative of what archaeology-specialist audiences of the journal would appear to accept as a valid critique.

Directed by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a feature-length French-British co-production, about the prehistoric paintings in Chauvet Cave and the archaeological research about them. In her review, Aspöck approaches the film as one would an academic archaeological text publication, isolating the artistic and narrative aspects of the film from the “archaeological information” and “archaeological facts” which she asserts are “mainly communicated in the form of interviews with archaeologists” (2012: 328-9). She contends that essential archaeological information is absent from the film, such as acknowledgement of a scholastic debate about the age of the paintings, contextual information about palaeolithic chronologies, discussion of other archaeological finds from the cave and their relation to the paintings, and archaeological maps. The latter is particularly confounding as the film does appear to use – and animate – the laser scan maps created by the archaeology project, as part of a tour sequence within the film (See stills 2.1). Aspöck also explicitly differentiates the archaeological team's experiential and personal accounts of their work at Chauvet Cave from the "communication of archaeological facts," conveyed via interviews (Aspöck 2012: 329).

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Still 2.1: Stills from Cave of Forgotten Dreams showing the archaeological map of Chauvet cave, based on the laser scans made by the archaeology project. (Top): animated fly-through tour of geological features marked in yellow writing; (bottom) overview of map and scanning procedure. [Source: Cave of Forgotten Dreams DVD (Creative Differences © 2010)].

Subsequently, Aspöck twice makes the astonishing claim that Cave of Forgotten Dreams is not a documentary:

"There is archaeological information that is missing from the movie. For this reason, it may be argued that the movie does not represent a documentary in its strictest sense…".

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And:

"The label 'documentary' may be misleading as the movie lacks archaeological information. But would it be as memorable if it were a traditional documentary?" (Aspöck 2012: 330, 331).

This is despite Cave of Forgotten Dreams being co-produced by three high profile documentary production companies, directed by one of the world’s most high- profile documentary filmmakers, screened at documentary-only film festivals, and recipient of 8 Best Documentary film critic awards. Equally frustrating, Aspöck gives no suggestion of what genre Cave of Forgotten Dreams might be instead, and no definition of what she considers a “traditional documentary” to be.

These glaring oversights – published and received unproblematised in a peer reviewed archaeological journal no less – clearly demonstrate the substantial gap between how archaeologists and filmmakers (and audiences, scholars, and the film industry) define, value, use, and understand documentaries. Instances such as Aspöck’s review neatly encapsulate how confused and contradictory archaeology’s reception of archaeology documentaries and the documentary genre more generally can be. This attitude becomes even more explicit when we move from archaeology documentaries on film, and turn our attention to television.

2.4 Archaeological perspectives on factual TV

2.4.1 Television as dissemination and outreach

A good example of archaeology’s troubled reception of archaeology on television can be found in an editorial debate between three archaeologists published in the academic journal Near Eastern Archaeology in 2008. Eric Cline initiates the debate by recounting a feud he had with a television producer in 2005 in which the "hapless" producer allegedly asked him for referral advice for experts to discuss the Iliad, which led to an argument between them about the archaeology programme being hosted by a survivalist rather than by an archaeologist (2008: 172). Cline then scathingly condemns all the archaeology documentaries he has taken part in, citing issues of sensationalism, inaccuracy, his lack of control over the interviews and editing process, and the differences in pay experts receive in comparison to production crew members. He drifts from the personal to the general, lamenting "the amount of garbage that frequently passes for

14 Chapter 2 archaeological education on cable TV," and contends that television producers are "more interested in making the shows entertaining than accurate" (2008: 173). Cline argues that despite these problems, archaeologists must still take part in such shows in order to "take back our field" from “amateur enthusiasts” (2008: 174). His conclusion deserves to be quoted in full to illustrate the intensity of this perspective:

"There's an audience out there that's obviously willing to sit and watch shows about archaeology, regardless of the quality. Do we owe it to them to make sure that what they are watching is good or at least reasonably accurate? Absolutely; our [American School of Oriental Research] Code of Ethics states that we should be bringing our knowledge and expertise to the public. So does anyone out there know any TV producers? Intelligent ones, I mean? Ones who don't have a priori assumptions about the topic or agenda to pursue and who think that shows can be both entertaining and accurate, for heaven's sake?" (Cline 2018: 174).

Cline's editorial provides insight into many archaeologists’ assumptions about archaeology on television. First and foremost, Cline mistakenly assumes that the non-fiction television programmes he took part in are representative of the documentary genre more broadly – despite the fact that non-fiction television programmes actually have ‘factual TV format’ status within both the film industry and scholarship, and have a far more complex relationship to the documentary genre than he appears to be aware of. Cline demands that documentaries should disseminate unaltered the findings of archaeologists to public audiences – an attitude that adopts an extreme form of Reithianism1 regarding television’s role in society. Cline finally asserts that this transfer of knowledge is an ethical obligation for archaeologists, demanding them to challenge media makers in order to protect and promote archaeology as a discipline.

Another, more qualitative example of this perspective is a 2013 study by Bonnachi investigating the audience demography and experiences of the British archaeology factual TV series Time Team (1994 - 2014). Unlike other archaeological critiques of archaeology on television Bonnachi correctly does not refer to Time Team as a documentary (she labels it a format), but she does cast

1 Reithianism takes the view that public service broadcasting should ‘inform, educate, and entertain’, in service of the nation and without commercial influence, among other principles. Reithianism is discussed further in section 5.5.1.

15 Chapter 2 television as an educational tool. Bonnachi aimed to deconstruct audiences’ motives for watching Time Team into "experiential" components such as gaining or consolidation of knowledge, change or development of attitudes and value, or acquisition of skills (my emphases, see table 2.2), and then she thematically coded viewers’ responses into 'experience types,' such as learning (figure 2.1).

Experience Excitement Playfulness Contemplation Learning Types

Gaining or Adventure Diversion Aesthetic pleasure consolidating knowledge Change or Experience Sociability/time Travelling through development of Meanings for family and - space and time attitudes and friends values Immersive Being like a Acquisition of - experience detective skills

Table 2.2: Bonnachi’s Audience Experience Categories: Types and Meanings (after Bonnachi 2013: 121). Experience meanings grouped into experience types, based on the revised version of the classification by Kotler and Kotler (1998).

n = 251 % of UK respondents for each experience type 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Learning 66% Excitement 60% Playfulness 23% Contemplation 17%

Figure 2.1: Bonnachi’s Audience Experience Types: by amounts (after Bonnachi 2013: 124.

Bonnachi concluded that viewers of Time Team were more likely to visit archaeological sites, choose archaeological careers, and "develop an informed understanding of the aims and methods of archaeology that was not known to the general public at the end of the 1980s" (2013: 121, 129). Bonnachi is quoted

16 Chapter 2 here to highlight her distinctly educational evaluation of the format. Her goal, like many archaeologists, was not to develop an understanding of archaeology television programmes according to film, documentary, or media studies criteria, but to repurpose and critique television formats according to the educational and outreach aims of archaeology as an academic discipline. For instance, it is worth noting that the value system informing Bonnachi's study is modelled on previous pedagogical surveys such as The Generic Learning Outcome Framework, which was originally designed to identify evidence of the outcome and impact of learning in archives, museums, and libraries (by Hooper-Greenhill 2002, cited in Bonnachi 2013). Although evaluations such as Bonnachi’s are indeed thoughtful and thorough, ultimately their privileging of educational aims to the exclusion of other qualities (art, aesthetics, journalism, social justice, etc.), further alienates archaeology from film and media practice and scholarship, limiting the usefulness of her study.

Most archaeologists who write on the topic of archaeology on television broadly accord with Cline and Bonnachi’s knowledge-dissemination and education- focused expectations of archaeology on television. For instance, in an article saliently titled 'Conveying Archaeology to the Public – The Experience, "Herxheim goes National Geographic TV”’ (2010), Andrea Zeeb-Lanz recounts the "enthralling" collaboration between a German archaeology project and a television production, commenting how "it is very interesting to see how scientific content is conveyed through the means of modern filming techniques [...] to a wider public," and commends the National Geographic crew for "how wholeheartedly our film partners take the challenge of a truthful presentation of scientific facts," (2010: 15). Likewise co-authors Zarzynski and Pepe in their guide book ‘Documentary Filmmaking for Archaeologists’ focus on the communicative power of television as an "educational tool", as well as "the best means for archaeologists or cultural resource managers to inform the public about their archaeology projects," (2012: 13, 15). Other archaeologists of a similar frame of mind include Tarabulski (1989); Light (1999); Finn (2001); Baxter (2002); Hills (2003); Van Dyke (2006); Taylor (2007); Fagan (in Clack and Brittain 2007: 128); Sperry (2008); Schablitsky (in Schablitsky and Hetherington 2012; Schablitsky 2014); Belford (2013); and Gately and Benjamin (2017) – to name only a few. When television programmes inevitably fail to meet archaeologists’ ambitious educationalist aims, they are accused of ‘dumbing down’ archaeology, ‘oversimplification’, ‘sensationalisation,’ and for some, they instigate fears that

17 Chapter 2 archaeologists have ‘lost control’ to ‘irresponsible writers, directors, and editors’ (quoting Schablitsky, in Schablitsky and Hetherington 2012: 139-143).

In their critiques, neither Cline, Bonnachi, nor any of the archaeologists discussed above, refer to any media or film study methods that might have provided pertinent context for analysing the purpose, definition or outcomes of documentaries or factual TV programmes. Consequently, and regrettably, despite the well-meaning intentions and hard work of those archaeologists, such studies ultimately have perpetuated our discipline’s own misunderstandings of the documentary genre, as well as of the wider film and television industries and their practitioners, serving only to further isolate archaeologists and archaeology from fully understanding our relationship to documentary.

2.4.2 Television as mediation

A more nuanced analysis of archaeology documentaries is proffered by archaeologist Karol Kulik in her seminal Ph.D. thesis, Mediating archaeology: the relationship between archaeology, the media and the public in Britain (1996- 2002) (2005). When starting her research Kulik fully expected to address the problem of how archaeology was being 'controlled' and 'misrepresented' by the media and consumed unwittingly by the public. However, over the course of her investigation into print journalism and television coverage of archaeology, and influenced by media theorists such as Stuart Hall and Roger Silverstone and social theorist Michel Foucault, Kulik came to fault her original approach as perpetuating an out-dated blame-game:

"I began to wonder whether media representation – what Day (1997: 39) calls the "reel-real" issue – might be a curious amalgam of a straw man (put up because it's so easy to tear down) and a red herring (thrown in to draw attention away from more serious concerns), and to ask myself what these more serious concerns might be" (2005: 6).

Accordingly, Kulik shifted her attention from media (mis)representations of archaeology, to instead investigate how mediation works as a communicative process which actively constructs archaeology (2005: 1).

Kulik redefined media representations such as television documentaries as 'media artefacts,' able to be studied as archaeological objects in their own right. She then studied these ‘artefacts’ by adapting and applying science communication models to them. In this way Kulik demonstrates how complex and dynamic the process of

18 Chapter 2 mediation can be, by positioning archaeologists as the 'source' of archaeological information which is then mediated by editors, peer-reviewers, employers, press officers and others, before it reaches journalists, filmmakers and other members of the media, before finally reaching the many 'publics', as shown in one of her communication pathways models (see figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2: Kulik’s model of archaeologists’ communication pathways [Source: Kulik 2005: 214 (Reproduced with permission of Karol Kulik © 2005)].

As a case study, Kulik takes as her ‘artefact’ the Gédéon production featuring Jean-Yves Empereur’s 1995 maritime archaeology excavation of the Pharos of Alexandria, which was edited in three different ways to make three separate television programmes for broadcasters and their audiences in France, UK and the USA.2 Through this case study, Kulik demonstrates that rather than serving as a

2 The three Gédéon programmes also each had different titles: La Septième Merveille du Monde (‘The Seventh Wonder of the World’) (France 2: 1996); The Seventh Wonder of the World (BBC2: 1996); and Treasures of the Sunken City (NOVA: 1997).

19 Chapter 2 mere regurgitation of archaeological facts, documentary filmmaking is instead a dynamic creative process through which archaeologists and producers work together to create very different experiences for differing audiences. For instance, such differences include elements which Kulik labels ‘partisan propaganda’: differing narratives deliberately designed to convince a range of authorities, sponsors, and public audiences to protect and support current and future archaeological research (2005: 363).

Kulik’s thesis is also sustained in her 2006 content analysis study of 590 archaeology television programme transmissions in Britain between 1998 and 2002. In this study Kulik concluded that British television coverage of archaeology during this period had actually been beneficial to archaeology by providing a broad and less sensationalised portrayal of the discipline than previously assumed, as well as being beneficial to broadcasters who used archaeology to rebrand and legitimize their factual format programming in the competitive broadcast marketplace (2006: 75, 88). Kulik even goes as far as to label the turn of the millennium a 'golden age' for archaeology on television (2006: 88).

Kulik contends that archaeological knowledge is ultimately constructed through the editing process of documentary filmmaking, redefining the archaeologist- media-public relationship as unequivocally interdependent. She rejects the view that media-makers and the public are 'conduits,' 'recipients,' or obstacles in the way of archaeologists disseminating their messages, and instead repositions media-makers and the public as 'collaborators' to archaeology – each partner valuing and benefiting from the other in a range of ways (2005: 13; 374a).

However, despite the more positive and nuanced perspective which Kulik brings to the discourse about archaeology documentaries, in her Ph.D. post-script she contradicts her own argument by advocating what seems to still be an overall one-direction pathway of communication wherein archaeologists are positioned as the 'source' and 'first mediators' of archaeological stories, and public audiences as the final recipients, albeit via more pathways and to-and-fros via other mediators, such as TV producers (see figure 2.2, from Kulik 2005). In light of what she identifies as a post-millennium decline in enterprise journalism and slots for archaeological programmes on British television, Kulik (like Cline) asserts that archaeologists need to "fight back" "to regain control over the public communication of their profession, encourage journalists to investigate and criticise their work, and play their role of 'first mediator' more vigorously" (2005: 107, 197; 378). She also submits to a Reithian perspective by arguing that a

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"mixed-diet, public service broadcasting that seeks out and engages the widest possible audience is healthier for public discourse" (2007: 124). Finally, by limiting her analysis to broadcast factual TV as the primary platform of archaeological communication – an assumption that appears to have been inherited from her study’s methodological roots in science communication – her work can with the benefit of hindsight be seen to be dated and unnecessarily restricted. For example, at the time of her writing Kulik disregarded the internet as a viable source of news (2005: 377), but such a technologically determined scope reduces the utility of her argument, which would have had more currency if applied to genres of storytelling such as documentary – rather than the ever- changing media of distribution.3

2.4.3 Television as theory

Like Kulik, archaeologist Angela Piccini has also sought to untangle the relationship between archaeology and documentary on television, beginning with her Ph.D. Celtic constructions: Heritage media, archaeological knowledge, and the politics of consumption in 1990s Britain (1999), and continuing through her body of scholarship since. In accordance with Kulik, Piccini compellingly argues that archaeology in factual TV can be recognised as the co-production of archaeological knowledge and, consequently, of archaeology as a discipline. Her investigations have also led her to interrogate archaeologists' definitions of media, the moving image, television, documentary, and factual programmes; and how the spheres of archaeology and documentary coalesce to create disciplinary boundaries for the other (2014: 3, 4).

For instance, one of Piccini’s most enlightening investigations was a three-week ethnography of Time Team, a pilot study for a larger research project that aimed to examine the production practices of the Channel 4 series. Although the larger project never came to pass, Piccini's account of the pre-production of a Time Team episode about an archaeological site at Lellizzick in Cornwall (produced by the Picture House production company in London), provides a though provoking case study exploring the notion of documentary filmmaking as archaeological co- production. Piccini recalls how, in the second week of her study, the researcher (Ben, also an archaeologist) and the assistant producer (James) "assembled" the

3 For instance, it should be remembered that video file sharing across a range of devices, whether legal or illicit, had kicked off by the turn of the millennium and was well established by 2005 when platforms such as YouTube were launched.

21 Chapter 2 archaeological site for the episode via the scripting process, which itself was informed by a combination of archaeological and film production materials and people (see also still 2.2):

"The production team is also in an entangled relationship with office space, books, reports, surveys, photographs, OS maps, books charts and so on, which are cognate with the material encounters of the field archaeologists at site. [...] Out of this relationship emerge archaeological evaluations that incorporate site background, aims and objectives, methods, resources and programming, bibliography, maps, staff lists, figures. Materials and practices congeal in the form of a production bible with site details, contacts, contributors, local diggers and metal detectorists, permissions, post-excavation plans, locations. Where James and Ben tell me that they are just making programmes to the best of their abilities, and that there is not much in the way of choice, clearly they are implicated in a specific assemblage. Their process, just like the resulting programme, is an implicitly processual archaeology that assumes the archaeological record can be directly read and historical documents serve as evidence for environmentally-determined social change." (Piccini 2014: 10).

Still 2.2: Photography by Piccini of the view across James’ desk towards Bens, showing the archaeological "assemblage” of Time Team [Source: Piccini 2014b: 12 (Reproduced with permission of A. Piccini  2014)].

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Piccini also counters claims by archaeologists that there is a lack of archaeological theory present in media and television representations of archaeology (e.g. Shanks and Tilley 1987; Piccini 1996; Kulik 2005; Shanks 2007; Taylor 2007), and that documentaries at most merely reflect or reproduce archaeological discourse (Hobden 2013). Instead, Piccini asserts that it is through a documentary's adoption and performing of specific theoretical positions in archaeology that the genre functions as a site for both theoretical discourse and production (2014: 1, 15). As such Piccini positions Bettany Hughes' Helen of Troy (Channel 4, 2005), Daughters of Eve (Channel 4, 2010), and Divine Women (BBC, 2012), explicitly within an American archaeological feminist scholarship; Dan Cruickshank's Lost Treasure of Kabul (BBC, 2002) and Gus Casley-Hayford's Lost Kingdoms of Africa (2010-12) within political archaeological practice; characterises The Celts (BBC, 1986), and Digging The Past (BBC, 2007) as postmodernist; and suggests the Origins of Us (BBC, 2011), Digging for Britain (BBC, 2010-current) and Time Team (Channel 4, 1994-2014) can be recognised as implicitly advocating scientific positivism and processualism (Piccini 2014: 7; for astute parallels of archaeological theory with documentary modes see also Piccini 2007b: 224).

Building on these readings Piccini asserts that the act of recognising one media practice as archaeological (for example academic publishing), whilst excluding another (such as television or film productions) is a political act carrying assumptions that follow theoretical stances (2014: 4; see also 2012). In this way, her conclusions chime with wider archaeological discourse on the role of the visual media in archaeology. Stephanie Moser’s explorations of the relationship between museum displays, scientific illustrations, and artistic paintings and archaeology have shown how archaeological visualisations do not simply reflect archaeological facts, but instead have played a fundamental role in embodying theories and perspectives, in constructing knowledge as a part of the scientific process, in sustaining past ideas, and in defining disciplinary boundaries (Moser 1998; 2001; 2009; 2012; 2014a; 2014b; Moser and Gamble 1997; Moser and Smiles 2005). Sara Perry too has shown how visualisations – such as televisual coverage of the Institute of Archaeology at University College of London – played an essential and pragmatic role in legitimizing and sustaining the Institute as a professional teaching, research, and commercial organisation during the mid- twentieth century, as well as embodying theoretical advances and scientific boundary setting for the wider discipline (Perry 2011: 7). Subsequently Moser and Perry both call for a breakdown of dichotic notions of ‘us vs them’ perpetuated by

23 Chapter 2 archaeologists, as well as the dichotomies of popular versus scholarly; public versus academic; educational versus intellectual; and so forth (Moser 2001: 281; Perry 2011: 21; 2014).

Piccini’s argument – that archaeology on television plays a central role in constructing the discipline by co-producing archaeology both behind the scenes and for a public audience – is made with such cogency that it seems almost obvious in retrospect. However, her thesis becomes slightly weaker when she too reverts to the same Reithian view of other archaeologists by characterising television as a "care structure" that allows the public to access archaeological theory and enables funding for archaeology as its key benefits. Her statement that documentary narratives explicitly addressing archaeological theory "will only appear when archaeologists produce their own media and seek senior management positions in broadcasting" (2014: 15), evokes Cline’s call to "take back" archaeology from the media (admittedly a notion Piccini refutes in her later work in Knowle West (discussed below in section 2.6.2 below) but it is mention it here to show how ingrained this assumption in archaeology can be). Likewise, Piccini’s narrow application of her hypothesis to factual TV as a medium rather than documentary as a genre, operating across media (a problem which she acknowledges, Piccini 2014: 14; see also 2007a, 2007b), also feels like a missed opportunity. This, combined with her focus on home as the place at the receiving end of television, despite the many other contexts of reception (e.g. via the concept of habitus, a theme discussed in her 1999 doctoral thesis and returned to in her work with Insole in 2013), means her eloquent arguments risk being side-lined as too narrow in scope, for both archaeological and film discourses on archaeology documentaries.

2.5 Archaeological perspectives on filmmaking as a scientific record

There is currently a lively discourse in archaeology advocating the use of filmmaking4 as a method of scientific recording on sites during excavations – or, to put it another way – to produce ‘documentary’ evidence in the most literal sense of the word. These recordings are usually devised as filmic equivalents of

4 As filmmaking terms are used interchangeably by archaeologists when describing each project, in this section I have used the same terms each author uses respectively, before a discussion of filmmaking terminology at the end of this section.

24 Chapter 2 archaeological field diaries and photography. These productions include video diaries of excavations (Hanson and Rahtz 1988; Brill 2000; Stevanovic 2000; Tringham et al. 2012); the use of underwater cameras on Remote Operating Vehicles for monitoring and streaming live footage from underwater archaeological sites (Ballard and Durbin 2008); experiments with wearable cameras for recording excavators’ experiences of archaeological sites (e.g. Chrysanthi 2015); the use of drone videography, and the use of archival footage in evaluating the state of conservation of archaeological objects and sites (Arnshav and McWilliams 2017).

Those who subscribe to using filmmaking as a scientific recording tool for archaeology conceive of and conduct filmmaking experiments in a range of ways, but nonetheless share a few fundamental assumptions, beliefs, and values about this form of filmmaking. First among these is a rejection of what archaeologists’ term 'popular' documentary filmmaking, combined with a belief that archaeologists can use filmmaking scientifically to "take back" archaeology from film and television practitioners (Cline 2008; see also Hanson and Rahtz 1988; Baxter 2002; Morgan 2012, 2014). Following this, film scholarship and practices also tend to be rejected by these archaeologists, who instead choose to conceive of film and video footage as a distinct form of pure, scientifically accurate, archaeological, ‘documentary’ data.

Whilst this literal approach to ‘documentary’ filmmaking might seem reasonable at first, I venture that it has led archaeologists into myriad problems, ranging from the technical, to the aesthetic, to the ethical. This is most clearly demonstrated in the filmmaking experiments conducted at Çatalhöyük and for the PATINA project.

2.5.1 Videography at Çatalhöyük

The archaeological project perhaps best known for its aims to establish a method for filmmaking as a form of scientific record is the excavation project of the neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey. Reflective accounts of these experiments have been made by Dorothée Brill (2000), Mirjana Stevanovic (2000), and Ruth Tringham and her team (2012).

Dorothée Brill details the first four years of "video-documentation" at Çatalhöyük during the excavation seasons (between 1995 and 2000), during which videography was introduced as a form of as archaeological data and a means for

25 Chapter 2 recording the daily evolution of the excavation including the interpretation and decision-making processes (2000: 229). This was to fit within the larger aim of the Çatalhöyük project to experiment with and promote reflexive and multi-vocal methods of archaeological research design (Hodder 2000). At first the video- documentation at Çatalhöyük was performed by invited film students from the German Art and Design University Karlsruhe Hochschule für Gestaltung, who appear from Brill's description to have originally partnered with the Çatalhöyük project as part of the collaborative Cultural Heritage and Archaeological Multimedia Project (CHAMP). The Karlsruhe team also created three 20 to 30- minute documentaries as part of a commission for the Science Museum of Minnesota. The film students thus were set with two differing objectives: as well as collecting film material for the CHAMP multimedia CD-ROM and the Museum documentaries (both intended for public audiences), they were also tasked with capturing scientific documentation of the excavation project for research and archival purposes (for expert archaeological use). With these arguably conflicting objectives it is not surprising when Brill found that the mismatched aims of the Karlsruhe film team and the Çatalhöyük archaeological team were unable to be reconciled (2000: 230). Brill’s final verdict of the filmmaking was a dismissive one:

"The irrelevance of the principles of 'film aesthetics' in shooting and editing the footage for the video database, and the lack of visually- striking subject matter conflicts with the fundamental raison d'être of filming…" (Brill 2000: 233).

Brill states that after four years it was still too soon to judge whether the video recording performed on site during this period had any long-term archaeological benefit, deferring such an assessment to be determined by future archaeologists. She contended that for the footage to have "archaeological value" as a "research tool", that the only solution was to replace the filmmakers with an archaeologist to take on the role of collecting video-documentation, and that this occurred in the 1999 season (2000: 233).

Working alongside Brill at Çatalhöyük during the 1990s, Mirjana Stevanovic further delineates this scientific approach to filmmaking by detailing how the Çatalhöyük project then established the Berkley Archaeology at Çatalhöyük Integrative Archival Diary (BACH): a multimedia database for text, audio, visual, and video material captured during the course of multiple excavation seasons, preserved as data for research and archival purposes (2000: 236). Stevanovic

26 Chapter 2 explicitly positions the BACH filmmaking as a counter to the "traditional" and "popular video-recordings produced by National Geographic (e.g. the Nova series)," in other words, archaeology documentaries intended for television broadcast, which Stevanovic faults as overly selective in content, sensationalist, “staged”, costly, and overall more relevant to "business experts" than to archaeologists (2000: 235-8). She also distances the BACH project from the partnering Karlsruhe and Minnesota Museum projects due to their target public audience and therefore perceived limited scientific relevance, although she concedes that many of the clips from these 'outsider' filming projects were also included in the BACH database (2000: 236). In contrast to the 'outsider' film projects on site, Stevanovic describes the aims of the BACH project to encourage using "video-filming" to document the process of archaeology as completely as possible, systematically, from multiple angles, and by maintaining a constant presence on site (2000: 236). This material took the form of regular structured video diaries, filmed and narrated by the field archaeologists, detailing the features, stratigraphy, and interpretations of the site. It was analysed as stills in screen capture format and used not only as an archival reference, but also for slides, prints, and to assist in creating site plans and drawings (2000: 237).

Stevanovic argues that one of the key benefits of using video as a recording medium was not only the collection of a more textual description of the soils and material culture, but also how the filming process forced the archaeologists to observe, explain and discuss the archaeological record quite literally from different perspectives. She concludes that video recording for data collection purposes is the way forward for excavations: "our vision of the twenty-first- century archaeologist is a person with a trowel in a back pocket, cordless earphones and microphone on the head and a computer station with video next to the excavation trench," (2000: 238).

Ruth Tringham, Michael Ashley, and Jason Quinlan took over videorecording at Çatalhöyük in 1998, and during their time the role of filming in the BACH project was gradually limited to recording for the purposes of data collection, interpretation and storage for the Çatalhöyük databases only. The perceived shortcomings of the "professional filmmakers" from Karlsrühe and the Science Museum of Minnesota, who according to Tringham et al. had focused too much on communicating to their public audiences "the process archaeology as a set of problem-solving activities rather than to provide information," motivated the archaeologists to conduct their own videography using consumer-grade handy-

27 Chapter 2 cams, as shown in still 2.3 (Shane and Küçük 1998, cited in Tringham et al. 2012: 39).

Still 2.3: Filming the video recording diaries at the BACH project at Çatalhöyük [Source: Ruth Tringham (Reproduced with permission of Ruth Tringham, CC BY 3.0, 2012)].

Tringham's team intended this filmmaking to be seamlessly integrated with the excavation data: "We treated photography, video, audio, illustration, and spatial coordinates as additional lines of evidence that must be handled with the same level of rigour as other excavation recording," (2012: 32). They estimated that 40 hours of video were collected every excavation season (2012: 44). These video clips were manually logged in writing on a 'media recording sheet' in the same manner as other forms of site documentation such as contexts, artefacts, features, and soil samples; noting each video clips unique filename, date, authors, description, scales used, location and cardinal direction, among other details (2012: 32). These video recordings of excavation features, daily diaries, weekly syntheses, as well as videos of discussions and social events were intended by the BACH team to be an essential part of the formal description of the excavation and scientific process, to be preserved as aides-mémoires for later reference and for crosschecking with other excavation data (e.g. see still 2.7) (2012: 41). They were also used to report excavation findings to public audiences online (stills 2.4, 2.5, 2.6).

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Still 2.4: Çatalhöyük Research Project BACH Area Excavation video interface. [Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project website (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, 2019)].

Still 2.5: Çatalhöyük video BA2_25_8, labelled as: “Reporter: Ruth Tringham; Tuesday August 25th 1998; Space 86”, hosted on the Çatalhöyük website. Unfortunately, 20 years after filming, the resolution of the video posted online is too low to see or understand many of the features discussed. [Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project website (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, 2019)].

Still 2.6: Çatalhöyük video “Priority Unit 31578”, Building 132, Space 531”, showing a cut and fill of a post retrieval pit, as presented by Arek

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Klimowicz, hosted (and competing with other videos) on YouTube [Source: Çatalhöyük YouTube Channel (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, 2019)].

Still 2.7: Screenshot of CatDV video catalogue of BACH video records at Çatalhöyük [Source: Figure 3.14 in Tringham et. al. 2012: 41 (CC BY- NC-SA 4.0)].

However, recent director of the Çatalhöyük Visualisation Team, Sara Perry, has been critical of the history of filmmaking at Çatalhöyük, noting that not only were the making of video diaries mostly abandoned by the end of the 2000s but that each videography project suffered a short life span and staff experienced a high turnover, impacting continuity of both method and outputs (2015: 198). According to Perry, the videography along with other forms of visualisations had ultimately failed to meet its full potential, instead proving to be a typically “top- down” and “perfunctory recording of the archaeology” (2015: 198). Under Perry’s direction, the Çatalhöyük Project largely turned away from video as a scientific recording method and towards a range of digital visualisation productions, such as laser scans and 3D models.5 Perry’s evaluation chimes with warnings from archaeology theorist Michael Shanks that any form of archaeological data collection – including videography – will result in projects “drowning in data” and still offer little new in terms of multivocality if the modes of production and hierarchies of creating archaeological knowledge in practice are not adequately restructured as well (2007: 275).

5 That said, it should also be noted that the video diaries are still used by the BACH team for reference and presentation purposes according to Tringham (2019), and continue to be uploaded to YouTube (most recently January 2019), see also http://lasthouseonthehill.org/collection/day-day.

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2.5.2 Videography in the PATINA Project

Another notable attempt to use filmmaking as a form of scientific recording on excavations was the Personal Architectonics Through INteraction with Artefacts (PATINA) project, which took place at two archaeological sites between 2011 and 2014: again, at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, as well as at the Roman port of Portus in Italy. The PATINA project explored how wearable video cameras could be used by archaeologists during excavations to record the process of interpretation during archaeological fieldwork (Chrysanthi et al. 2015). Like the videography at Çatalhöyük, the PATINA project was method oriented and positioned itself as openly opposed to "staged and third-party recordings," possibly alluding to news media, and factual TV and documentary filmmakers who had visited both sites (2015: 239-40, 267). The PATINA project also aimed to address the shortcomings of the previous filming projects at Çatalhöyük, alleging that these videos, too, were staged and had failed to capture the actuality of excavation, and that the separate offline storage of video content, isolated from other excavation data, rendered it inaccessible to both researchers and public audiences (2015: 241). To counteract these problems the PATINA experiment had 17 archaeologists wear and control their own consumer level wearable video cameras while carrying out their usual activities on site (see Stills 2.8). The study participants were encouraged to make documentary recordings of events or discussions at their own discretion, kept notes and photos about their use of the technology, and were interviewed about their video recording experiences (2015: 246). At the end of each day the participants were given back their own captured video material which they could then reflect on, archive, and choose to share (or not) with their peers in the video archival software Synote (see Still 2.9) (2015: 247).

Still 2.8: PATINA filmmaking in process: (left) participants with cameras hooked onto their ears during fieldwork; (right) video being reviewed in Synote

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[Source: Figures 1 (left), 6 (right) Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 245, 249 (Reproduced with permission of Angeliki Chrysanthi  2015)].

Still 2.9: Photograph showing two PATINA participants using Synote to access, watch, and annotate their videos at the Portus project [Source: Figure 3 Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 248 (Reproduced with permission of Angeliki Chrysanthi  2015)].

The PATINA authors argued that the key benefit of this approach to video recording was its enabling of the excavators to share their own perspectives of "interpretation at the trowel’s edge" on their own terms, to fill in the gaps of the official archaeological record, and to allow an extensive interrogation of the visual and audio ways archaeologists interpreted the materiality of the archaeological record, leading to a restoration of "things" as the protagonists of the archaeological narrative, rather than archaeologists (e.g. Still 2.10) (Hodder 1997, cited Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 247-8, 253-261).

Still 2.10: Archaeologists interpret a bone artefact, as filmed by a PATINA participant [Source: Figure 11 Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 245 (Reproduced with permission of Angeliki Chrysanthi  2015)].

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Chrysanthi and her co-authors ultimately concluded that wearable cameras should be used by archaeologists as flexible, high-resolution tools of observation, documentation, reflection and dissemination, with the added benefit of creating an archival resource for both archaeologists and a wider public (2015: 267-8). However, the PATINA project also unexpectedly encountered problems regarding surveillance, ethical treatment of filmed subjects, and self-censorship – issues which were left unresolved. Let us now consider the issues, challenges, and contradictions that emerged in both the Çatalhöyük and PATINA documentary filmmaking projects.

2.5.3 Emergent issues in filmmaking for scientific recording

Before critiquing the above filmmaking experiments by archaeologists, I believe they first deserve to be commended on a personal as well as scholarly level. It takes courage, care, and both physical and mental fortitude to undertake the unique challenges of filmmaking within an archaeological context, and the lengthy commitment of the Çatalhöyük team to experiment with filmmaking is particularly admirable. It is also clear that the above film projects did their best to fulfil their respective and specific aims in exploring tailored modes of filmmaking for and by archaeologists, for the purposes of data collection, archiving, public outreach, and educational outputs. However, these experiments also share similar epistemological limitations which I argue reveal the shortcomings of approaching ‘documentary’ filmmaking as a form of objective scientific recording.

2.5.3.1 Filmmaking as a form of technology

The first mistake archaeologists have made is to fixate upon and even fetishize the latest technologies of filmmaking. For instance, in evaluating the potentials of video for recording archaeology Hanson and Rahtz closely evaluated technical specifications such as image resolution, colour fidelity, camera adaptability to lighting, zoom features, the ability to play back video, as well as camera and tape formats, costs, battery life, and archival lifespan – but of now outmoded camcorder technologies (2000: 107-109). Likewise, Ballard and Durbin focused their assessment of filming at underwater sites chiefly on the camera hardware on the Remote Operating Vehicles (ROV), as well as the MPEG file types, data compression, bandwidth, and broadcast technologies used – many long since superseded (Ballard and Durbin 2008). At Çatalhöyük, the BACH team dedicated much of their evaluation of filmmaking to the effects of the shift from analogue to digital cameras, workflows, and data management (Tringham et al. 2012). A

33 Chapter 2 key aim of the PATINA project was to address the design and influence of technologies in archaeological research by having the participating archaeologists conduct a user evaluation of the different wearable cameras, and the video archiving software Synote (Chrysanthi 2015: 238). In particular, the archaeologists closely assessed the cameras' recording duration, image resolution, audio quality, capability to capture soil colours and stratigraphy, and spatial distribution of archaeological features (Chrysanthi 2015: 250-253). And whilst the PATINA authors raise issue with problems of audience reception, self- reflexivity, and subject behaviour and attitudes, ultimately the PATINA team do not follow up these lines of enquiry. Instead, they conclude that their method of video recording on site provides "a high-resolution observation tool for providing insights towards future technological and theoretical developments in the discipline" (Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 268).

Whilst scholarly interest in the technical aspects of filmmaking and archiving certainly has its place in examining the role of filmmaking in archaeology, archaeologists’ over-emphasis of these aspects of filmmaking has blinded us to the wider cultural, historical, and practical aspects of non-fiction and documentary filmmaking and archiving. We have consequently overlooked the social and cultural meanings embedded in framing, lighting, lenses, movement, sound, eye-line, and shot length – which are sustained across technologies and formats. These manifest themselves as subjective prejudices engineered into camera hardware, such as the gender bias built into the weight of professional camera equipment, the right-handed bias of camcorders, and the history of racially determined colour film stocks and processing, auto-colour balances, and face detection software (e.g. for a first-hand account of colourism engineered into film stocks see McFadden 2014). Each of these components of filmmaking brings its own conventions, clichés, range of audience receptions, scholastic and practice-based readings, debates, practical solutions, and so on. All have for the most part been ignored by those archaeologists who seek to treat film as primarily a form of technical expertise or scientific data. Instead of considering how filmmaking language and conventions might affect the application of filmmaking in archaeological situations, archaeologists have lazily and repeatedly dismissed these elements under the banner of "film aesthetics" – deemed to be irrelevant to archaeological aims (e.g. Hanson and Rahtz 1988: 110; Brill 2000: 233). This preoccupation with the technical specifics of camera technologies quickly makes many of our accounts dated and redundant as new camera types,

34 Chapter 2 editing workflows, dissemination pathways, audience receptions, and filmmaking standards and conventions come and go.

Likewise, the scripting, treatment writing, and any kind of pre-production preparations are also largely absent from scientific accounts of filmmaking. Editing too – the essential process of making meaning from captured film footage through the selection, analysis, sequencing, and treatment of clips – is only briefly mentioned in passing, and only then as either a problem of time management to be carefully scheduled during research design, or rephrased as a step to "recontextualize clips into new videos" using editing software – with no discussion of editing procedures or decisions (e.g. Morgan 2014: 328; Tringham et al. 2012: 42). Meanwhile the PATINA team deliberately omitted the editing function from the version Synote they used so that their participants could only annotate, delete or share the captured material, not edit it – arguably skipping much of filmmaking’s meaning-making process (Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 249).

Finally, archaeologists have gone as far as to characterise filmmaking, archiving, and distribution as an "easy" and "increasingly effortless" pursuit that can be achieved without recourse to the knowledge of filmmakers, film scholars, and other relevant media experts (Brill 2000: 233; Morgan 2014: 339; Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 251). For instance, Tringham advocated that archaeologists and heritage professionals should either conduct their own filming, or collaborate with "documentation" or "digital specialists" (Tringham et al. 2012: 44). Morgan has likewise argued that the simply made "punk" videos by archaeologists are preferable to polished archaeological films by professional filmmakers, because “punk” videos provide more "correct" and "authentic" depictions of archaeology (Hanson and Rahtz 1988: 111; Morgan 2014: 324; 339; Brill 2000: 233).

By elevating the technological aspects of filmmaking and by dismissing and removing documentary filmmakers, scholarship, and expertise from the discourse around filmmaking in archaeology, archaeologists claim they have removed the tensions and problems that accompany filmmaking within archaeology, and can therefore more effectively use film as scientific evidence in a purely rationalist and positivistic sense. What we have in fact done however, is misattribute the challenges that are inherent to non-fiction filmmaking as problems exclusively caused by filmmakers and media practitioners. By scapegoating filmmakers and media practitioners we have subsequently isolated ourselves from the existing body of experience-based knowledge available to us via film scholarship and practitioner communities. The effect of this is that archaeology is largely

35 Chapter 2 responsible for impairing our own research designs, analyses, and the quality of our debates about how we can incorporate filmmaking into archaeology. This has not only practical consequences for archaeology but legal and ethical ones, which we have put ourselves as risk of transgressing.

2.5.3.2 Filmmaking as a form of surveillance

A recurring issue raised by filmmaking archaeologists is a concern is that non- fiction filmmaking might engender a form of surveillance on archaeological excavations, especially as cameras become smaller, wearable, and less obtrusive. The conflicting goals of using filmmaking to create a scientific record of archaeology-in-action whilst also attempting to avoid creating a filmic account of the social, political, or personal realities of archaeology, have also been further complicated by assumptions that this same scientific record which is intended for peer-to-peer communication and archival purposes, can also be unproblematically recut for public audiences for educational and outreach purposes. For example, although in 1988 Hanson and Rahtz characterised filming on archaeological sites as beneficial for site morale and team cohesion because "diggers like to see themselves on screen in the evening" (1988: 111), by the 2000s at Çatalhöyük, archaeologists found that the presence of cameras changed archaeologists' behaviour on site, and described filming on site as "intrusive" and even "pointless" (Brill 2000: 232; Chadwick 2003: 103, cited in Morgan 2014: 336; Morgan 2012: 90, cited in Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 242). Morgan gives a prime example of this when recalling her and other archaeologists' distinct wariness towards outsider filmmakers:

"This feeling of being watched was especially true when videographers or people recording sound would come on-site without warning. It was disconcerting to look up and realise that you were being filmed – what was I saying? [...] The availability of inexpensive videotape allowed a more casual use of filming around the site, and the zoom lenses and directional microphones allowed videographers a false proximity to excavators who may or may not be aware that their actions and conversation were being captured and subsequently used without their knowledge or permission." (Morgan 2012: 90, cited in Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 242).

One solution archaeologists have proposed to ease concerns about surveillance is that if the filmmaker were to be an "insider" – in the form of a long-term collaborator or another archaeologist – then intimacy and trust would be more

36 Chapter 2 easily achieved and the risks of surveillance can be mitigated if not nullified (Brill 2000: 232, 233; Morgan 2014: 336). Referencing Human Subjects Review as a potential standard (the US university review boards that facilitate human subjects research to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects), Morgan suggests that the subjects of filmmaking should not be filmed “unawares”, that no media featuring subjects be published without their permission, and she implies that interviewees should be offered to review film footage of themselves (Morgan 2014: 336).

In contrast to this perspective, during the PATINA project Chrysanthi observed that at Çatalhöyük even archaeology team members who attempted to conduct explicit and transparent modes of filming on site were still criticised by their fellow excavators as being intrusive, and at Portus the reactions of archaeologists to being filmed even by their peers was particularly "varied" to the extent that members of the excavation team withdrew from the PATINA project altogether (Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 242, 246, 264). By then explaining their ethical procedure in detail to the archaeological team, by handing over control over filming and archiving decisions to the excavators themselves, and by openly sharing the first recordings among participants, the PATINA researchers later claimed they not only resolved concerns of surveillance on site but that their approach resulted in near total filming access – albeit one accidentally recorded "intense" conversation that was excluded from the PATINA archive in a what appears to have been an act of self-censorship (Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 264). Fascinatingly, and bravely, the filming approach adopted by the PATINA team appears to have opened a Pandora’s box for considering the role of visual media as a mechanism of control, surveillance, power, and subversion within archaeology (Chrysanthi 2015: 242).

The problems the PATINA team encountered led them to question the degree of self-censorship performed by archaeologists who changed their language and behaviours when they became aware they were being filmed, out of concern of peer criticism and professional and legal liabilities. It also raised questions for the PATINA team of whether they should classify the collected footage as ‘private’ or ‘public’ and how it should therefore be used (Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 265). This question taken can be taken further: if filmmaking is deployed to document archaeological excavations, should we consider archaeological sites to be a public or private space? If archaeology is indeed conducted for the good of society, how

37 Chapter 2 much public (or otherwise) scrutiny are we willing to allow of archaeological projects?

Stepping back to briefly consider this matter from a legal angle: when it comes to differentiating documentary filmmaking from surveillance or amateur filmmaking, different countries, regions, cities, towns, and venues each have their own parameters for filming standards and permits. For example, a guiding rule in international documentary filmmaking is that if the filming is done in a privately- owned space like a house and captures a visual and/or audible record an identifiable person, then written or filmed statements of consent of individuals is usually sufficient. If the filming is done in a public space depicting crowds or groups of people within a single frame, or if participants’ faces or voices are not distinguishable, then individual consent is usually not needed. Filming permits for public and archaeological sites often come under the jurisdiction of local heritage authorities or government departments. Evidence of such permissions is often required for public screenings at festivals, and for licenses of sales and broadcasting. Footage used without these permissions in place can be used only if it meets journalistic standards such as reporting for the sake of ‘the public’s right to know’. Additionally, with each layer of filming permissions come a range of specific legal and ethical obligations regarding captured versus published footage, copyright, and so forth. Thus, we can begin to see how archaeologist’s abovementioned concerns about surveillance are not simply a matter of technology or ‘filmmakers behaving badly,’ but are in fact already addressed by a broad range of pre-existing media laws, filmmaking standards, conventions, scholarship, and ethics. Therefore, any discussions about the ethics of filmmaking in archaeological contexts should be framed by a rigorous and pragmatic understanding of this broader media context – not merely according to the narrow parameters of academic research, especially when footage is intended for public release. However, with the exception of the PATINA project and more of Piccini’s work (see below), archaeologists have for the most part not addressed the broader legal and ethical contexts of our own filmmaking.

2.5.3.3 Filmmaking in the form of remixing

Strikingly, archaeologists’ concerns about surveillance stop short when it comes to the remixing of archived footage. Archaeologists describe the reusability of film and video footage to be a significant benefit of filmmaking on archaeological sites, with captured footage able to be edited and remixed indefinitely for dissemination purposes. Archaeologists have praised the "limitless opportunities

38 Chapter 2 to recontextualize (or remix)" video footage and enthusiastically advocate its use at conferences, in lectures, museum installations, published online, in games, and its use in outreach and teaching activities. For example, archaeology students were given full access to re-edit the videos from the BACH video archive in order to make their own multimedia productions (Tringham et al. 2012: 45, 46; see also Hanson and Rahtz 1988: 111). Morgan avers that "most media can be 'remixed' to serve any purpose," stating that footage that might have been filmed for an educational video can even be repurposed for slapstick comedic parodies, and she further advances the notion of "radical remediation," which she describes as "critical, self-referential re-uses of media that de-centres the original subject" (2014: 329).

Those who advocate for remixing of film footage are correct in saying that there are few technological restrictions on the storage and reuse of digital video. However, while the above uses of the footage on the surface appear innovative and no doubt the authors are advocating remixing with the best of intentions, the fact that the moral, legal, and ethical implications of remixing have not been problematised by archaeologists is deeply concerning. Again, with the exception of the PATINA team, it is evident that while archaeologists are concerned about surveillance in terms of the capturing of film footage, especially when done by non-archaeologists, they are yet to extend these concerns to the footage for rest of its lifespan or contexts of its use. This leaves archaeology open to potential future ethical and legal conflicts regarding authorship, copyright, consent, and misrepresentation. Again, this contradiction shows how wide the knowledge gap is with respect to ethics in filmmaking, when comparing the archaeological discourse to that of wider film scholarship, archival, and documentary practitioner communities. In the latter, it is the possible usage of filmed material over its lifespan rather than the contexts of its capture which is more commonly problematised, debated, legislated, and used to inform legal participant consent procedures, such as the use of release forms and debates about terms used for ‘worldwide’, ‘throughout-the-universe’ (e.g. via satellites), and ‘in-perpetuity’ distribution.

2.5.3.4 Filmmaking as “giving voice”

An underlying aim of the scientific approach is an effort to democratise the recording and interpretation of archaeology by using the media of film and video (Brill 2000: 230; Morgan 2014: 339). Morgan asserts that by conducting their own "punk" filmmaking on sites, archaeologists can achieve multi-vocality,

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"radical transparency," and provide "a vibrant intervention into the archaeological record" (Morgan 2014: 325, 339). This assertion however sits in contradiction with the findings of the PATINA project who, as discussed above, observed how even when filmed by their peers that archaeologists were prone to self- censorship, distrust, and were unwilling to be openly self-critical, undermining attempts to achieve genuine reflexivity (Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 265).

It is also difficult to accept archaeologists’ claims of seeking to provide transparency and multi-vocality via their own filmmaking when at the same time, they reject outsider-filmmakers' access, expertise, and interpretations of archaeology. This contradiction was particularly explicit at Çatalhöyük despite the original wider project aims of multi-vocality and reflexivity. For example, regarding the friction experienced when working with television producers, Hodder encouragingly states:

"We can decry this situation and lament the loss of archaeological authority. Or we can embrace such experiences as a function of the erosion of boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture. In the latter case, the archaeologist welcomes the wider public appeal and recognises the need to speak to different communities and to argue a case in relation to a variety of different points of view. The boundaries around the discipline are eroded, and the enclosed self-sufficiency of the archaeological academy is punctured, but as mediator and provider, the archaeologist enters into a wider debate, often full of dissonance and frustration, but in which active social engagement becomes possible." (2000: 10).

Regrettably however, such aspirations appear to have been only that. As we have seen, in practice, rather than embracing outside voices archaeologists at Çatalhöyük and elsewhere have increasingly sought to control or exclude outsiders from authoring archaeological narratives. Restrictions on access and the freedom to interpret what is encountered, whether along creative or journalistic lines, is surely the opposite of transparency. Those who follow the scientific approach have assumed that archaeologists can be trusted to capture and present archaeology on film accurately, objectively, and without agenda; whilst at the same time assuming filmmakers will always misrepresent archaeology through ignorance or thoughtlessness, and therefore should be kept at a distance (e.g. see Morgan 2014: 340). It is perhaps unsurprising then, when archaeologists justify their attempts to control archaeology on film by literally casting

40 Chapter 2 themselves as "stewards" of the filmed material itself, and by extension, of the archaeology and its interpretations (e.g. Tringham et al. 2012: 44).

2.5.3.5 Scientific recording and filmmaking terminology

Another characteristic of a scientific approach to filmmaking of archaeology is a haphazard appropriation of pre-existing filmmaking terminology. The terms "videography" and "video recording" dominate, and "film", "video", "filmmaking", "video-filming", "video-documentation", "documentary," "moviemaking", and "programmes" are all used loosely and sometimes interchangeably by archaeologists – despite having pre-defined histories, meanings and usage within film practice and scholarship (e.g. see Morgan 2012: 78; Morgan 2014; Brill 2000; Chrysanthi 2015: 240; Stevanovic 2000: 235). To paraphrase Hargreaves and Ferguson, this conflation of terminology demonstrates how archaeology and the media have missed each other not so much like two ships sailing in the night, but like two ships sailing in different hemispheres (2001: 63). Although archaeologists may be using the same words as filmmakers and film scholars, we are effectively talking a different language. Of course then, it has been impossible to find common ground.

Some archaeologists have taken the redefinition of film terminology further by deliberately attempting to distance filmmaking by archaeologists from filmmaking by non-archaeologists. Colleen Morgan narrowly defines "archaeological filmmaking" for describing films "made by an archaeologist in order to communicate some aspect of archaeological research" – sharply distinct from what she calls the "clichéd" and "popular documentaries" made by "professional filmmakers" (Morgan 2013: 325, 330). Confusingly, Morgan also defines early archaeology documentaries to be "archaeological films" while differentiating and reserving the term "documentary" solely for television productions – but then also quotes earlier descriptions by other archaeologists who label those same "archaeological films" as "documentaries" (Morgan 2014: 326, 327).

Archaeologists’ obfuscation of filmmaking terms demonstrates that while archaeologists are quick to adopt, experiment, and “take back” filmmaking in practice, we have again chosen not to engage with the existing knowledge about filmmaking available via film scholarship and practice. Instead we have built our understandings of filmmaking by borrowing from analogous studies in psychology, digital humanities, computing science, and anthropology (see

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Morgan 2014; Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 246). We have also entrenched a firm dichotomy by overtly positioning ourselves via this scientific approach to filmmaking in opposition to "traditional" documentary filmmaking, deepening the misunderstandings and subsequent tensions between the two fields.

2.5.4 Further critiques regarding filmmaking as a scientific record

This same scientism that has led archaeologists to invent our own definitions of documentary and non-fiction filmmaking, has not passed by unscrutinised when it comes to other forms of visual archaeology. As a pioneer in applying reception theory to archaeology, Stephanie Moser has repeatedly cautioned archaeologists of the pitfalls in ascribing any archaeological images the “impossible role” of objective record (Moser and Smiles 2005: 11). She warns against adopting unrealistic criteria for accuracy and correctness for archaeological visualisations, reminding us that “representation is never innocent” (Moser and Gamble 1997: 186; Moser and Smiles 2005: 1; Moser 2001: 275; 2012: 303; 2014a: 62). She rightly points out that newer or more technologically based visual traditions are also not necessarily better or more realistic or accurate than those that have gone before them (Moser 2012). Although Moser herself focuses on archaeological imagery in art, illustrations, and museums, her argument can easily be applied to film and so serve as a good summation of and rebuttal to any scientific approach to filmmaking of archaeology:

“…many archaeologists working today would want to distinguish the valuable from the frivolous, perhaps using as a criterion the extent to which an image records rather than imagines its subject. On such grounds we might presume that the record, as a more research-orientated image, would be less open to critical visual analysis and might, indeed, function as a corrective to other representations of the past circulating in fine art and popular contexts. The records, in some Popperian sense, would be an image founded on secure data and from which no false inferences could be derived. What vitiates this aspiration is the naïve assumption that an image can be created and apprehended “transparently,” as though some forms of graphic communication can offer pure, unmediated apprehension of their subjects. A moment’s reflection shows that even excavation reports are coded, bearing traces of wider beliefs about evidence, knowledge, and the communication of both.” (Moser and Smiles 2005: 2).

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Sara Perry, too, has warned that attempts to reduce recordings to wholly transparent and certifiable visual records are “a doomed effort” (2015: 193), and if archaeologists genuinely wish to experiment and master new media forms, we must first:

“…become fluent interpreters and manipulators of “old” media – or risk continually reproducing a long history of dubious and injudicious representational practices and forms.” (Perry 2009: 391).

She also raises issue with archaeologists’ devaluing of the expertise of media- makers. Discussing the role of visualisations in the professionalisation of archaeology, Perry remarks:

“It is the very process of ostracizing such people from the production of valid knowledge that professionals come to invent themselves as the keepers of expertise. Yet archaeology’s professional status depends upon a range of participants – with their differing skillsets and specialties – to sustain itself today. As Carr (2010) notes, on the ground, expertise is born out of its enactment – in its gestures, its spoken words, its apprenticeship of new workers, its engagements with people outside the institution, its application of different forms of specialized media, etc. In other words, it is always in a state of evolution.” (2014: 6251)

We can see how the development of such expertise was curtailed at Çatalhöyük, where – despite initial attempts to learn from and collaborate with filmmakers, and despite differing archaeologist-practitioners mastering basic recording and editing techniques – the ‘documentary’ filmmaking there has barely changed or improved upon itself since its introduction in the 1990s. It failed to evolve. Perry also astutely points out that “just as the capacity to read or write is not tantamount to aptitude in critical thinking,” technical visual skills (such as video recording or editing) neither equate to greater recording accuracy or interpretative proficiency: “Visuality is neither unknowable, undemanding, nor reducible to merely rote processes of manufacture” (2011: 14).

Regarding the archiving of archaeology footage, archaeologist and performance/film practitioner Angela Piccini and performance scholar Caroline Rye also make a salient critique of what they identify as a video-based "archive fever" that has gripped archaeology, arguing that "as every documentary filmmaker knows, media technologies do not 'capture' life, they do not store memory, they do not provide a window on the past," (2009: 35; also see Shanks

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2007). Piccini, Moser and Smiles (2005: 11) and Perry (2009; 2011; 2015), each add to a growing body of critique of uncritical uses of archaeological visualisations – including filmmaking – as objective scientific records.

2.6 Filmmaking as creative and collaborative community enquiry

Not all archaeologists who pick up a camera have pursued a scientific approach to filmmaking – a small but dedicated handful have embraced the subjective, creative, and disruptive potentials of both the film medium and the documentary genre. Key among them is Angela Piccini and her colleagues, who together have largely led the way in reconceiving the potential roles for non-fiction filmmaking and documentary within archaeology.

2.6.1 A creative treatment of archaeology

"This is not a film. I wanted to explore how to practice an archaeology through a video practice but I am not a video practitioner. I work in a university drama department but they think I'm just an archaeologist. I work in a university archaeology department but they think I'm just a drama type. What I do once a week is research and teach archaeology for screen media, thinking beyond the standard broadcast documentary. I don't know about available light and white balance, but I am there in the shadows, on those screens, here now." (Piccini 2009: 183).

The above quote comes from the script of Angela Piccini's 2003 film Guttersnipe. these words can now only be experienced as part of an online video version of Guttersnipe, but they were originally intended to be recited live by Piccini as part of a spoken-word performance while the film played out beside her. Guttersnipe explores contemporary archaeology by depicting Piccini's journey by foot along a gutter in Bristol. The journey is seen and heard from the ground level and captured via a single unedited tracking shot, filmed on a MiniDV recorder tied to a stroller pushed along by Piccini – invoking the archaeological activities of field- walking, surveying, planning, photography, and recording (see Stills 2.11). Through the course of the video/performance Piccini gradually uncovers the layers of the past that emerge at the convergence of kerb and gutter, revealing it to be both midden and architecture, ephemeral and solid, space and structure (2009: 196). By 2009, when Piccini wrote her textual account of the 2003 filming

44 Chapter 2 of Guttersnipe, the gutters she had recorded had been flipped over or resurfaced by Bristol City Council in 2005, thus according her video another layer of value as ‘documentary’ evidence in the original sense of the word.

Stills 2.11: Stills from Guttersnipe, with which Piccini questions archaeology’s boundaries through her “creative treatment of actuality” [Source: Guttersnipe, Vimeo, Piccini 2009 (Reproduced with permission of A. Piccini  2009)].

Piccini performed Guttersnipe at music and arts festivals, locative media workshops, and archaeology conferences, before uploading it to Vimeo in 2011 (2009: 198). Through the making of Guttersnipe Piccini rejects the 'common sense' application of filming technologies to produce and transmit archaeological knowledge, and instead makes manifest John Grierson's original definition of documentary film as "a creative treatment of actuality" by using the practice of filmmaking to question archaeology’s boundaries. Record blurs in to event, text blurs into practice and performance, place into space, thing into representation, past into present, and material into digital (2009: 185; see also 2015). Thus, whilst Guttersnipe is undeniably archaeological in both content and purpose, it stands in clear opposition to the notion of a need to ‘take back’ filmmaking for archaeology, instead embracing avant-garde and documentary filmmaking as a form of creative archaeological enquiry. Rather than dismissing film aesthetics as irrelevant Piccini embraces the subjective and artistic qualities of filmmaking as a

45 Chapter 2 means to ask and explore questions about the nature of modern archaeology. For example, in Guttersnipe Piccini argues that film can be taken beyond questions of representation to instead be recognised as a material-discursive practice through which the past itself is produced (Piccini 2013: 11; 2014; 2015). She asserts that if "archaeological practice makes, rather than finds archaeology," then filmmaking in and about archaeology can be recognised as a form of archaeological production in its own right and so can offer new definitions of archaeology as a discipline, enabling the expression, exploration, and even generation of new archaeological theories (Piccini and Shaepe 2014: 467).

Piccini’s stance resonates with broader discussions in archaeology about the fundamental role visualisations have in archaeology as the embodiment of theory, for disciplinary boundary setting, and in constructing archaeological knowledge (see Moser 1998; 2001; 2009; 2012; Moser and Gamble 1997; Moser and Smiles 2005; Moser 1998; 2001; Perry 2011: 312; 2013; 2015: 205; Shanks and Tilley 1992, cited in Piccini and Shaepe 2014: 479). Piccini’s creative and epistemologically oriented approach to applying creative filmmaking to archaeology regrettably appears to have been somewhat side-lined in broader archaeological discourse on filmmaking, but other likeminded peers like Christine Finn (2007), Christopher Witmore (2004) and Colleen Morgan (2012, 2014), are also contributing to this creative discourse, and gradually a small but promising space to consider and practice creative non-fiction filmmaking within archaeology has begun to emerge.

2.6.2 Filmmaking as community co-production

Through the 2012 Know Your Bristol on the Move project (KYBOTM, Bristol City Council 2017a), Piccini also shifts the role of filmmaking in archaeology away from scientific recording and towards creative community co-production.6 KYBOTM explores how local communities can use film and video create community led histories of place through communal digitising, archiving, and curation of archival film collections. While the project incorporates Bristol's Iron Age, Roman and medieval heritage, it primarily focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary heritage, such as the advent of housing estates and the modern built environment (Piccini and Shaepe 2014: 477-8).

6 KYBOTM is an ongoing collaborative community project run jointly by Bristol University, Knowle West Media Centre, the National Film Archive, Bristol Records Office and the communities of Knowle West (Bristol City Council 2017a; 2017b).

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The film collections used in KYBOTM included 20 hours of broadcast programmes produced by the 1970s local community channel Knowle West TV (1973-75), and home movies digitised and donated by dozens of Knowle West community members (see Stills 2.12) (Piccini and Shaepe 2014: 483; Piccini 2015b; 2017). These films and videos were first digitised through locally held workshops, where community members had the option to then donate their videos to be incorporated into the online platforms of the KYBOTM blog, Know Your Place, and Map Your Bristol projects, making the material available for public and educational use (Bristol City Council 2017a; 2017b). The KYBOTM project also hosted student video editing placements, community screenings and workshops, and artists-in-residence, such as David Hopkinson who produced a series of short films exploring the themes that emerged through the archiving project (see Stills 2.12) (2015b). This collection of locally produced and curated film and video content is also hosted online by the City Council's Planning Office with the intent that it will provide archaeologically relevant information to be used by the City Council to inform future urban planning decisions (Piccini and Insole 2013: 2). Taken as a whole, this array of film, video, analogue, digital, online, in-person, private and public events of productions also make the KYBOTM project solidly cross-platform, enabling a range of audiences to continue to access and engage with the project well into the future.

Stills 2.12: Stills from Map Your Bristol and Know Your Bristol: (left) still of 1937 newsreel footage accessible through the MYB web interface, showing a car passing through the main gate of the medieval St John’s Church, today only accessible to pedestrians [Source: Bristol City Council 2017a; 2017b (Reproduced with permission of A. Piccini  2009)]. (Right) still of video projection of Ken Jones’ 35-mm slide, for Know Your South Bristol, June 2012 [Source: Insole and Piccini 2013: 10 (Reproduced with permission of A. Piccini  2009)].

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Still 2.13: Stills from On the Move Video Blog no. 20: (left) students editing films for the KYBOTM website; Knowle West community members attending a KYBOTM workshop [Source: Bristol City Council 2017a; 2017b (Reproduced with permission of Calling the Shots/University of Bristol © 2019)].

At first glance, the aims of KYBOTM appear to be similar to the more scientifically inclined aims of other archaeologists – of collecting, “remixing”/editing, archiving, and disseminating film and video "data" for primarily archival purposes. However, a key difference between the two approaches is Piccini’s deliberate aim of inverting the power structures of archaeological knowledge creation. The KYBOTM project grounds the construction of its film archive within community knowledge through the process of 'co-production.' This is achieved through the privileging of local and artistic voices above academic and professional archaeologists' voices, by giving the authors of the films – Knowle West TV, the local home video makers, and the artists in residence – not only fair credit for their authorship, but also control over the digitisation and archiving processes. As Piccini and Shaepe put it:

“If "archaeology is what archaeologists do" (Clarke 1973), through which processes of measurement and analysis produces distinct categories of "human", "landscape" and "material culture", then working with community through archaeological practices to co-produce understandings of the past through the material remains of digitised video opens out the disciplinary field, such that archaeology emerges from entangled emergent practices rather than being located within discrete bodies of people institutionalised as archaeologists.” (2014: 480).

Following the work of Karen Barad, Piccini and Shaepe also draw attention to the language of normative archaeological practice, such as the "cutting" and "slicing" through soil, categorisation of finds and features towards building "assemblages"

48 Chapter 2 and modelling past life-ways (2014: 468). They carefully apply an archaeological perspective to the filmmaking process, observing that in this combined context, archaeological assemblages come to include cameras, places, people, memories and the material media themselves (2014: 483).7 In this way Piccini argues that this filmic assemblage not only shows visual archaeological information, it is composed of archaeological objects themselves, deserving of archaeological treatment (2013: 8; 2017). Later, this leads Piccini to propose the intriguing concept of the camera truelle (or camera-trowel), following Astruc's idea of the camera stylo (camera-pen): the idea that filmmakers could use a camera as writers use a pen (Astruc 1948, cited in Piccini 2015a: 2).

Piccini also relates her work with the concurrent University of Local Knowledge (ULK+) project, run by US artist Suzanne Lacy and the Knowle West Media Centre, a large-scale collaborative community video project wherein participants created 1000 video interviews with locals about Knowle West history and society, including archaeological heritage (Piccini and Shaepe 2014: 480). These videos deliberately adopt and playfully manipulate the aesthetics of factual format television, such as by recasting local community members as experts in interviews by using "talking head" filming and editorial conventions – a practice usually reserved for academics and other elites.

Through Know Your Bristol On The Move, as in Guttersnipe, Piccini also exposes and challenges how archaeology uses dichotomies to establish the boundaries of the discipline: the exclusiveness of academic research transforms into an inclusive community-led and located knowledge practice; the objectified subjects become the knowledge experts; formal narratives merge with informal stories; the professional intersects with the personal; the private becomes public; "us" and "them" begin to blur – and ultimately the distant, reproduced past is reframed as not only situated in the present – but able to be changed by the people in the present as well.

What is particularly pertinent for the purposes of this thesis is the simple fact that Piccini is employing the praxis of documentary filmmaking to explore, question, critique, subvert, and redefine archaeology as practice, performance, and

7 Coincidentally, from a filmmaking perspective, these terms can be recast as neat analogies to the language and practice of filmmaking: film editors carefully "cut" and "slice" the rushes (the unedited filmed footage), categorising it into bins thematically, also towards making an "assemblage" as an early part of the editing process (see also the glossary for filmmaking terms, and section 6.3.12 for their usage).

49 Chapter 2 discipline. That KYBOTM and ULK are both situated in Knowle West is no coincidence. With a population of 12000, it is one of the most economically deprived suburbs in Bristol and is ranked within the most in-need 10% of British communities according to levels of crime and education. By using filmmaking and film archiving to invert the hierarchies of knowledge creation Piccini arguably invokes the original definition of documentary genre as envisioned by John Grierson as a means for stimulating social critique and change (Further discussed in Chapter Four, section 4.4). Through 'co-production' genuine multi-vocality is made possible, the boundaries separating academia from media's "mass audience" begin to dissolve, new knowledge is cultivated, archaeology is "created", and both parties are recognised for their respective expertise. Rather than using filmmaking to "take back" archaeology from the media, Piccini uses filmmaking to "give back" archaeology to the public. In this way, her aims are also very much in harmony with the ideals of the documentary genre and its process: to use filmmaking to 'speak truth to power' and to challenge the status quo.

Looking beyond the UK, there can be found further examples of archaeologists deliberately using non-fiction and documentary filmmaking to co-produce archaeological knowledge with a range of communities. In Australia in the 1960s, on becoming Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), archaeologist Peter Ucko restructured the government organisation’s Film Unit, deliberately cultivating the participation and employment of Indigenous filmmakers and archival staff. These staff would become the new caretakers of one of the largest collections of ethnographic film in the world, including films featuring the rock art and archaeology of their own and other Indigenous communities (Wiltshire 2017: 291-2). In Sphakia in Crete, archaeologist Lucia Nixon began filming an archaeological survey with an educationalist and scientific approach, before becoming ‘ruefully’ aware of the entrenched power inequalities between the incoming foreign archaeological team and the local island community. As Nixon put it: “one of the most interesting things about technologies such as film is they can bring out issues that were there all along” (2001: 77). Nixon subsequently adapted her films to recast local ‘informants’ as instead the ‘producers of meaning’ for the project; and to reframe her filmmaking as pathway of both reporting and reciprocal exchange, an opportunity to ‘hand back’ the archaeological knowledge to both Sphakian and national Greek audiences via a 1996 television documentary (2001).

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Genuine democratisation via filmmaking is not easily achieved however. Although Piccini advocates co-production for archaeology she also expresses caution about idealistic claims for its capacity to emancipate participants, warning that as appealing as they may seem alternative media can still fail to meaningfully oppose dominant ideologies (such as the community-TV movement in the 1960s and 1970s which fell into disuse), and that as visual media these films and videos still produce the unfortunate effect of disrupting and replacing human memory, as other more dominant forms of media do (Piccini and Insole 2013: 10, 11). She also warns against replacing one restrictive version of archaeology with another, that might equally suffer from the same social exclusivity and gaps (Piccini and Shaepe 2014: 485; see also Perry and Beale 2015; Perry et.al. 2015). All that said, while using filmmaking and archiving for creative community co-production of archaeology is clearly not without its shortcomings, it is a promising avenue for filmmaking in archaeology that nevertheless deserves further thought and exploration.

2.7 Concluding thoughts

Over the course of this chapter I have reviewed the recent archaeological literature on the subject of non-fiction and documentary filmmaking in archaeology. I have examined not only archaeologist’s critiques and studies of documentary films and television as finished products, but also the range of archaeologists’ own filmmaking endeavours including attempts to scientifically document and archive archaeological research on video, through to creative treatments of archaeology and community-led cross-platform co-productions. A clear narrative of archaeology’s relationship to non-fiction filmmaking generally, and to documentary filmmaking more specifically, has begun to emerge.

Archaeologists indisputably care deeply about how archaeology is represented on non-fiction screens. We know these productions have a real impact on how people value and engage with us as archaeologists, with archaeology as a discipline, and with archaeology as material heritage. Our heart-felt regard for the topic is evident in our many editorials and personal accounts about our experiences of documentary, our academically published reviews of archaeological films and television programmes, and our reports describing archaeologists’ own filmmaking experiments.

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At our best, our interest in documentary and non-fiction filmmaking has led us to collaborative and innovative studies and productions that have challenged our own assumptions of archaeology and helped our discipline to grow. Archaeologists have used documentary filmmaking to question our understandings of the power structures within archaeology, to consider diverse interpretations of archaeological places, objects, and people, to explore archaeological theories and epistemologies, and we have even reconceived of films and the components of filmmaking as material artefacts in their own right. However, and regrettably, these studies are a minority within archaeological discourse.

All too often, our regard for archaeology documentaries has turned away from legitimate criticism and instead towards defensiveness, hostility, and even the jealous guarding of material heritage from those who might interpret or value it differently. This viewpoint repeatedly manifests in default accusations of sensationalism, inaccuracies, dumbing down, and the many calls to “take back” archaeology from or “fight back” against some kind of monolithic media entity. We ourselves have framed archaeology’s relationship with documentary filmmaking as inherently polarised: educationalists verses entertainers, experts versus incompetents, us versus them. By taking such an antagonistic stance towards not only filmmakers but film scholarship as well, archaeology has consequently alienated itself from the very fields of knowledge that could have eased our relationship with documentary filmmaking and the wider media, and allayed our concerns about both. With only a few exceptions, our poorly informed accounts have perpetuated our misunderstandings. We have side tracked discourse by distracting ourselves with the latest technologies of filmmaking, we have erroneously conflated a small sample of factual TV programme formats with the entirety of the documentary genre, and we have confused film definitions to the point where they become meaningless. In our filmmaking experiments – although admirably made with the best of intentions – in our ignorance we continue to risk leaving ourselves ethically and legally open to conflicts with our contributors, participants, audiences, and colleagues. Ultimately, archaeologists have done to documentary filmmakers, scholars, and media practitioners exactly what we feared them doing to us: we have sensationalised their work, misrepresented their perspectives, dumbed down the complexities of the art and science of filmmaking, and by seeking to tightly control the interpretation of archaeology by documentary filmmakers and their audiences we have stifled creativity, freedom of expression, multi-vocality, and the growth of knowledge.

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The irony here is not only the perverse hypocrisy of archaeologists in our attitudes towards and treatment of documentary filmmakers and audiences – but the potential damage we have done to our own discipline and to archaeological heritage in the process. The filmmaking experiments conducted by archaeologists and discussed in this chapter are not the first. Archaeology has a rich history of archaeologists taking up the roles as non-fiction and even documentary filmmakers, to tell a broad range of narratives about the material past on screen. We have worked as writers, presenters, producers, cinematographers, and editors; in cinema, television, and on digital platforms. Archaeologists’ co- authorship of documentary filmmaking extends back to the 1930s, and our non- fiction filmmaking experiments extend back to the 1920s, possibly earlier. Some archaeologist-filmmakers have even written about their labours and experiments in the hope that we might learn from them. Lamentably, by distancing ourselves from and by disparaging the work of filmmakers, archaeologists have equally neglected and rendered our own corpus of non-fiction and documentary films invisible, and in doing so have lost awareness of the extent of our agency across a range of media. We have consequently lost not only a part of the history of archaeology as a discipline, but in some cases the physical films themselves and the audio-visual record of archaeology they preserve. Ultimately, we have done ourselves a gross disservice, by leaving many of our own experiences of and contributions towards non-fiction and documentary filmmaking off the record. This thesis addresses this gap, and asks how we as a discipline can do better.

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Chapter 3

Chapter 3 The Off the Record Survey

There are a few million people I would like to kill – mostly viewers.

Glyn Daniel live on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (BBC 1956).

3.1 Introduction

Archaeologists love a good yarn, and when it comes to the intersection of archaeology and filmmaking the conversation inevitably turns to reminiscences of productions past, when suddenly every archaeologist seems to have an amusing (or bemusing) story to tell about their experience working with the media, whether for television, film, or (more recently) social media. Beyond such casual banter, when words are committed to the published page, there are a discrete body of commentaries written by archaeologists reflecting upon and critiquing their experiences of archaeology media productions (e.g. Tarabulski 1989; Brill 2000; Finn 2001; Nixon 2001; Hills 2003; Taylor 2007; Pryor and Fagan interviewed in Clack and Brittain 2007; Renshaw 2007; Cline et al. 2008; Zeeb- Lanz 2010; Zarzynski and Pepe 2012; Hill 2012; Morgan 2014; Thomas 2015; Collison 2016). Some of these, like Clack and Brittain’s volume are well known, others little cited. How should we receive these accounts, told or written sometimes decades after the event, and varying in depth, detail, and reliability? Since archaeologists’ engagement with media productions is often voluntary, unpaid, and outside their usual work patterns, there is a dearth of evidence of the realities of archaeologists’ involvement in and experiences of film and television productions, let alone those specific to documentary. And yet such information is essential if we are to gain a credible and holistic view of this field of archaeological activity. Without baseline data it is impossible to contextualize and understand the myriad personal accounts about media shared by archaeologists.

In this chapter I therefore seek to fill the gap between anecdote and fact by exploring how, why, and on what terms British archaeologists participate in one particular type of media production: documentary filmmaking. By systematically collecting, analysing and interpreting this survey data, I have sought to create and analyse an accurate profile of British archaeologists' attitudes towards and experience of documentary filmmaking. Through thematic analysis significant

55 Chapter 3 issues, patterns, and points of contention were identified for closer study, and for comparison against related surveys investigating British professional archaeology (Everill 2012; Aitchison and Rocks-McQueen 2014).

3.2 Survey design and method of analysis

This survey was designed with the following specific aims and objectives:

3.2.1 Survey aims

1. To collect, describe and compare evidence of the current scope and nature of British archaeologists' attitudes towards and engagement with archaeology documentary filmmaking between 2006-2016. 2. To identify the features, themes, issues and patterns of experience and attitudes held by archaeologists in relation to archaeology documentary filmmaking. 3. To describe and characterise the overall nature of the current relationship between archaeologists and documentary filmmakers and media practitioners, from an archaeological perspective. 4. To determine whether archaeologists' documentary work can be considered a sub-sector of archaeological labour. 5. To provide grounded evidence towards demystifying the filmmaking process and monolithic notion of the 'mass media', particularly of the process of documentary filmmaking within its cinematic, broadcast and digital contexts.

3.2.2 Survey objectives

1. To construct, pilot, distribute and collect data from an online questionnaire investigating British archaeologists' attitudes towards and experiences of archaeology documentaries productions over the study period. 2. To identify, isolate and categorise significant themes, issues and patterns of attitudes and experiences that emerge through thematic coding using NVivo. 3. To describe the results both quantitatively and qualitatively, using a combination of graphs, charts, and a selection of comments and vignettes.

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4. To qualitatively analyse and interpret the collected data in order to generate an accurate and up-to-date profile of archaeology documentary filmmaking from an archaeological perspective. 5. To critically compare the results and analysis with other sources of relevant information (similar surveys, historical study, case-study).

3.2.3 Survey scope

To provide a comprehensive profile of British archaeologists' experience of and attitudes towards archaeology documentary filmmaking, the Off the Record survey was designed to be broad in scope but with set boundaries. A 10-year timespan from 2006 to 2016 was used to allow a higher prospect for responses, with the benefit of picking up where Kulik's previous research characterising archaeology documentaries had left off in 2005. Participation was restricted to professional archaeologists residing in the UK, who had undertaken a role in one or more UK-based archaeology documentary productions during the 10-year period (including British co-productions filmed overseas but produced in the UK). In keeping with the broader thesis aim to move the discourse from one rooted in television to instead include other forms of documentary, eligible productions included those intended for broadcast television, cinema, online release, interactive-documentaries (iDocs), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), animated documentaries, multi- and cross-platform documentaries, and unreleased (shelved or cancelled) productions. The survey excluded fictional works, reality TV, game shows, news media, experimental video art, vlogs, and promotional or corporate videography.

3.2.4 Questionnaire design

In total the survey questionnaire was composed of 34 questions, categorised into sections pertaining to: rates of engagement, pay and conditions, perspectives on documentary, and an opportunity to share a short story of an event or experience. A combination of question types, including open, list, and category questions were employed to keep the process dynamic and reduce boredom and drop-outs (after Youngman 1982, in Bell and Water 2014: 159; Denscombe 2014: 176). Answer options included making selections from prescribed lists via dropdown or radio button options, as well as text boxes for short and long form responses. Answering all questions was optional, and all questions were accompanied by comment boxes to give respondents the opportunity to provide

57 Chapter 3 further details, express their views in their own words, or even critique the questions asked (after Everill 2006). Comment boxes also provide a means to acknowledge more complex, intricate and even inconsistent answers.

Accuracy and recall can be issues in questionnaires as respondents are self- reporting and it is possible to verify the validity of answers given. As such I restricted the survey to collect basic demographic data, basic work details, and experiences and attitudes, leaving more particular details such as payments amounts, exact days worked, or detailed narratives for future research. That respondents are self-selecting and unsupervised risks survey bias, but was ultimately unavoidable at this early stage of probing the sector.

The Off the Record questionnaire was piloted with 6 test-respondents in mid-April 2016 using iSurvey, the University of Southampton survey platform. The pilot survey was also kindly reviewed by sociologist Dr Chris Moreh, a research fellow in the Centre of Population Change at the University of Southampton, whose feedback and advice helped ensure the questionnaire design was appropriate and would provide reliable and valid data. Problems which were identified and resolved at this stage included the need to clarify certain terms to make them more precise, reformulate particular questions to reduce ambiguity, and simplify answering formatting. The average length of time respondents took to complete the survey was 20 minutes. Pilot user feedback indicated a wariness about respondents being asked for gender and ethnicity demographic data, but despite this I felt strongly that these were necessary to include in order to examine issues of representation. A draft of the Off the Record survey, method statement, and website text was also assessed and approved by the University of Southampton ethics committee. A copy of the final questionnaire design can be accessed in Appendix B.

3.2.5 Survey sampling strategy and results

Prior to the Off the Record survey there was no existing data on archaeologists' engagement with documentary filmmaking, and therefore no pre-existing sampling frame. Consequently, the survey sample followed an exploratory and non-probability sampling strategy that combined snowball sampling with a cumulative approach by which the sample size was allowed to 'grow' until there was enough information to satisfy the research questions (Denscombe 2014: 33, 43, 51). This approach does not guarantee a cross-section of the total population of British (or UK-based) archaeologists, but still allows for a representative

58 Chapter 3 sample. In the end, this sampling strategy attracted 652 hits to the iSurvey webpage, resulting in 139 completed usable surveys, which represents approximately 2.5% of the British archaeology population – a small but adequate sample for analysis (based on population estimates generated by Atchison and Rocks-MacQueen 2014: 33).1

3.2.6 Method of survey data collection

The online Off the Record survey was launched on Monday 2nd May 2016 and ran for four weeks until Friday 27th May 2016. It was hosted on the University of Southampton iSurvey website, opening with a brief introduction to the research, contact details, and consent declaration. I am indebted to the following archaeological organisations who either allowed me to invite their members to take part by emailing them directly from iSurvey, or kindly circulated links back to the survey on my behalf, as well as reminder emails: the Association of Industrial Archaeology, the BritArch Mailing list, Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, Council of British Archaeology, Nautical Archaeology Society, Past Preservers, Portable Antiquities Scheme, Queens University Belfast, RESCUE, Society of Museum Archaeologists, University of Bangor, University of Bournemouth, University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, University of Cardiff, University College London, University of Durham, University of Glasgow, University of the Highlands and Islands, University of Kent, University of Leicester, University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, and the University of York. Talent agents of archaeologists who work in broadcasting also kindly agreed to pass on an invitation email to their clients to consider taking part.

I also ran a social media campaign promoting the Off the Record survey, leading up to, during, and immediately after the survey period, hosted across Facebook, Twitter, and a WordPress blog which provided the project details, researcher's contact details, University of Southampton contact details including the those for the Chair of the Ethics Committee, and a link to the survey). This provided an avenue for respondents to not only take part but to promote and share the survey with other potential participants beyond my reach (following the strategy of Brickman-Bhutta, 2012 cited in Denscombe 2014: 19). It also provided another

1 Although the total archaeological workforce population has grown since 2014, during the period when the Off the Record Survey was held (May 2016), the population was approximately the same, between 5755- 6253 (Aitchison 2017: 22).

59 Chapter 3 pathway for participants to contact me, bringing to my attention that the many archaeologists who fell outside the scope of the survey but who also wished to share their experiences of documentary production. At the end of the survey I invited respondents to join a mailing list to receive updates about the survey research. Via the mailing list, Twitter and Facebook I have expressed my thanks to all participants and shared research updates as appropriate. I also maintain a website as a point of contact for survey participants.2

I must acknowledge that administering the survey online created a bias in favour of those who had internet access during the survey period, although again I feel the benefits of online reach, convenience, and anonymity for the respondents overall minimised non-response bias and made it a preferable method when to other surveying methods (e.g. in person or by phone).

3.2.7 Survey ethics, anonymisation, and data protection

This survey was originally approved by the University of Southampton Humanities Ethics Committee (no. 20023), and all research participants gave their consent prior to taking part in the survey. In compliance with the University of Southampton policy on data collection and the Data Protection Act (1998), the collected questionnaires and their analyses are backed up securely on password- protected, offline external hard-drives, and intended for the purpose of this study only. Respondent details have been anonymised and any identifying information mentioned about individuals and organisations obscured during coding and writing.

3.2.8 Method of analysis

To analyse the questionnaire data, I employed grounded theory, applied in practice through thematic coding and managed in the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software NVivo. In this way, although the survey also provided baseline quantitative information (e.g. demographic data), I was able to focus on pursuing qualitative analyses in service of my main aims of exploring archaeologists' attitudes and experiences.

Grounded theory is an inductive approach to analysis which advances the construction of theories, concepts, and ideas as emergent from close observation

2 Off the Record website available at: https://archaeologydocumentary.wordpress.com/

60 Chapter 3 of the data (as opposed to beginning with a theoretical framework that is imposed on research from the outset). In practice grounded theory involves becoming familiar with the data by organising it, identifying and coding the data by themes (e.g. events, actions, opinions, words, implied meanings, etc.), categorising these codes into typologies, winnowing these to determine what is significant, developing a hierarchy of codes and categories, then checking these against the coded data through amended recoding, repeating the entire process as many times as needed in order to move towards key concepts (Denscombe 2014: 287). In this way, I first coded my questionnaire to identify quantitative trends and to mark a range of initial themes. I also coded for demographic observations and survey components such as questions, answers, text to discount, and errors identified (e.g. ambiguous terminology). I later refined my coding to focus on respondents perceived ‘problems and concerns’, ‘aspirations, hopes, and desires’, respondent opinions on ‘bad’ and ‘good’ documentaries, personal ‘motives’, the perceived ‘purpose’ of an archaeology documentary, ‘1- word/phrase’ answers, longer ‘stories’, ‘other interesting’ observations, and any striking or relevant ‘quotables’.

This approach to coding allows me to cut through the survey following multiple lines of enquiry. Following Dey’s advice (1993: 7, cited Silver and Lewins 2014: 170), I have endeavoured to take a deliberately constructivist approach to my analysis, maintaining an awareness that there will always be an 'abductive' interaction between the ideas that I bring to the study and the ideas that emerge from the data. I also subsequently employ critical discourse and narrative analyses in order to differentiate factual data (e.g. how many respondents got to review the edit, or not) from beliefs and attitudes (e.g. respondents’ opinions about reviewing the edit), and to identify and examine the hidden and implied meanings within respondents' answers and omissions (Denscombe 2014: 288, 291; Da Vaus 2007: 95).

I visualised the survey results using graphs and word clouds (based on word frequencies in answers given) to give a sense of archaeologists’ range of views and their frequencies. The graphs follow two colour schemes: warm coloured graphs (red, yellow, etc.) indicate factual information such as demographic data and amounts of engagement. Cool coloured (blue and green) graphs indicate respondent opinions, attitudes, and experience-based accounts. However, I acknowledge that such simple content analysis ultimately fails to account for the nuances and meanings within long-form responses. Therefore, I also include

61 Chapter 3 representative selections of respondents’ long-form answers, anonymised and presented verbatim (albeit for minor spelling corrections), to show either the shared patterns of experiences and opinions, or the atypical experiences and opposing or contradictory viewpoints which lay behind the quantitative data. Most respondents answered all questions, and this is indicated by n = 139. However, remembering that all answers were optional, when less respondents have provided answers to certain questions I have indicated the difference, e.g. n = 137, and the numbers stated within the graphs are based on percentages. The following summary is not exhaustive of the survey’s findings, and some analysis and comparisons continue in Chapter Six section 6.3. Please also see Appendix C for a summary of the overall survey findings.

3.2.9 Comparative studies

To provide further context to my survey analysis I also include comparisons of my findings to analogous studies of British archaeology as a profession.3 Labour market intelligence studies profiling the British archaeological workforce have been pioneered by Aitchison and Rocks-McQueen as part of the Profiling the Profession report series by Landwards Research Ltd (2014). Through comparison of longitudinal surveys repeated every five years (1997-1998, 2002-2003, 2007- 2008, 2012-2013), this data enables a broad analysis of the nature, trends, and shifts in labour conditions, salaries, states of employment, and professional needs of archaeologists working in the UK. This included archaeologists categorised as working in academic posts, university administration, local government, museums, civil society organisations, and commercial entities. In 2014, Aitchison and Rocks-McQueen estimated the total British archaeological workforce during the survey period (2012 to 2013) to be 5,940.4 When archaeological job types were profiled according to services provided, an estimated 56% of British archaeologists worked to provide “field investigation and research services”, 25% provided “historic environment advice”, 2% provided “museum and visitor services”, and 17% “worked for organisations that provided education and academic research” (2014: 11). However, this study presumes an arguably narrow definition of archaeological activity, as at no point during the survey were archaeologists asked about their work in or with any media productions, let alone the services or outputs produced by such work. Across the

3 See Chapter 6 for further comparisons with the US and UK documentary film sectors. 4 See above of footnote 1, regarding 2014-2016 population comparisons.

62 Chapter 3 range of 389 jobs identified under 236 different post titles no media roles were listed, and media related work was excluded from the list of post profiles – unless we are to take "other" as representative of media related labour (2014: 12, 54- 56). There was only one mention of 'filming' in the report: in relation to organisations' investment in internally identified skills gaps and training, listed alongside GIS mapping, fieldwork safety and health and safety (2014: 150). I suspect that this omission of media-related work conducted by British archaeologists is not merely a case of oversight in survey design - if this were the case respondents might have made mention of their media-related labours themselves. Rather I suspect this lack of inclusion of media related work is reflective of archaeologists' as a whole failing to recognise the value of media- related labour. By failing to ask about media production labour, the notion that it is irrelevant to 'doing archaeology' is perpetuated, even if unintentionally.

A more experience-oriented study of British archaeologists' participation in and attitudes to the archaeological profession was conducted by Paul Everill in his seminal Ph.D. thesis and subsequent publication suitably titled: The Invisible Diggers. Contemporary Commercial Archaeology in the UK (2006; 2012). Also employing a surveying strategy, run online from 2003-2005 and then again in 2012, and supplemented with participant observation and an interview series, Everill documented British archaeologists' experiences and perceptions of commercial archaeological labour. Among his findings Everill identified patterns of male dominance in the sector, entrenched and institutionalised hierarchies, a perceived need for increased professionalism, a sense of 'self-sacrifice' thought necessary for pursuing archaeology as a career, the importance of camaraderie, and overall low pay and poor conditions of employment (2012: 193-194).5 Particularly relevant to this thesis, Everill also precipitated early indicators regarding how British archaeologists' understand archaeology ‘documentary’ television in relation to their profession. He identified a common trend among respondents who characterise television coverage of archaeology as the inspiration for planting a childhood interest in archaeology, influencing the decision to pursue archaeology as a career (2012: 102, 105, 113). Confounding this positive aspect of the relationship however, Everill also identified archaeologists’ recurring concerns about ‘documentary’ television representations of archaeology. Some of Everill’s respondents blamed these for

5 The relevance of these specific characteristics regarding archaeology’s relationship with documentary is further discussed in section 6.3.

63 Chapter 3 causing the poor pay conditions for field archaeologists by cultivating public misunderstanding of commercial archaeology, namely Time Team's 'well-funded' 3-day digs, which respondents claimed led planners and developers to financially undervalue archaeological labour and expect a similar turn-around for 'real' excavations (2012: 175). Other respondents – notably those who had at some point been involved with Time Team – dismissed claims that audiences accepted shows like Time Team at face value, and suggested the show was understood by audiences as merely entertainment (2012: 175). Everill's study thus signals the contradictory and varied attitudes archaeologists have towards archaeology documentaries and their impact on the discipline.

Impressed with the depth and nuance of information which Everill generated, I have adopted some of his questionnaire design strategies for my own survey, such as the use of comment boxes, one-word summaries, storytelling, and questions about pay and conditions. The intent is that this will not only generate equally insightful new data, but allow for comparisons between the two studies. However, like Aitchison and Rocks-McQueen, Everill too based his data collection on an arguably narrow definition of archaeology as excavation-centric, therefore excluding questions about media related tasks or roles such as filmmaking. Regrettably, omissions such as this only deepen the divide between archaeology and documentary filmmaking by obscuring the labour and experiences of the archaeologists involved.

3.3 The Off the Record survey findings

3.3.1 Who is taking part, and how?

Demographics

The 'average' Off the Record survey respondent was a 43-year-old male university- based archaeologist, living in England, of white British ethnic background, holding a Master’s degree or higher.6 This demographic profile is remarkably similar to that of the 2012-13 Profiling the Profession profile of British archaeology - who's 'average' UK-based archaeologist was a 42-year-old male

6 Respecting user feedback of respondents in the pilot survey regarding gender and ethnicity questions, I decided not to push participants into discomfort by collecting data on dis/ability or sexuality. However, in future, I recommend such data be included for comparison with studies of demographic inclusion/representation across other sectors.

64 Chapter 3 commercially based archaeologist, living in England, of white British ethnic background, holding a Master’s degree or higher (Aitchison and Rocks McQueen 2014: 10, 11). The obvious difference between the two profiles that span the profession was respondent job sector, with Off the Record respondents more likely to be based in the academic sector (40%) than the commercially (28%), in comparison to a commercial sector dominance (59%) versus academic (14%) in the broader British archaeological professional landscape (Aitchison and Rocks McQueen 2014: 11). Otherwise the demographic parallels between the two surveys are distinct, indicating that the Off the Record survey presents a fair representation of British archaeologists engaged with the documentary sector.

Figure 3.1: Respondent Age by Percentage

(n = 139) Q. 6.1 3 % Unanswered 0% 18 - 24 0% 18 - 24 4% 65 - 70 15% 25 - 34 15% 25 - 34

17% 55 -64 33% 35 - 44

28% 45 - 54

17% 55 -64

33% 35 - 44 4% 65 - 70

28% 45 - 54 3 % Unanswered

Figure 3.2: Respondent Gender by Percentage

(n = 139) 1% Prefer not to Q. 6.2 50% Male disclose 0% Other 5% Unanswered 44% Female

5% Unanswered 50% Male 44% Female 1% Prefer not to disclose

0% Other

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Figure 3.3: Respondent Location by Percentage

(n = 139) 9% Scotland 79% England Q. 6.3 6% Wales 9% Scotland 0% North 3% Ireland Temporaril y Outside 6% Wales 3% UnansweredUK 0% North Ireland 79% England

3% Temporarily Outside UK

3% Unanswered

Figure 3.4: Respondent Ethnicity by Percentage

(n = 139) Q. 6.4 77% [White] 3% [White] Irish 77% [White] Welsh/English/Scottis Welsh/English/Scottish/Northern h/Northern Irish/British Irish/British 3% [White] Irish 18% Any other White Background 18% Any other White Background 1% Any Mixed/Multiple 1% Any Mixed/Multiple Ethnic Ethnic Background Background 1% Indian

Figure 3.5: Respondent Highest Level of Qualifications by Percentage

1% Unanswered 6% Post-doctoral 5% Other (n = 139) Qualification Q. 6.6 37% Masters Degree

35% Doctorate (PhD or Dphil) 19% 19% Bachelors Degree Bachelors 37% Masters Degree Degree 6% Post-doctoral Qualification

5% Other 35% Doctorate 1% Unanswered (PhD or Dphil)

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Figure 3.6: Main Sector of Archaeological Employment by Percentage

(n = 139) 17% Other (Non- Q. 6.8 profit; Self employed) 40% University Sector

28% 28% Commercial Sector Commercial Sector 17% Other (Non-profit; Self employed) 9% Local Government Sector 9% Local Government Sector 4% Museum Sector 40% University 4% Museum Sector Sector 1% Civil Society Organisations 1% Civil Society Organisations

1% Unanswered 1% Unanswered

Extent of Participation

During the 10-year period covered by the Off the Record survey, 53% of survey respondents stated they had taken part in 2 to 5 documentary productions, 20% had taken part in only 1 production, and 16% in 6 to 10 productions. At the other end of the scale, 2% of respondents had participated in over 50 productions, and 1% of respondents had participated in over 100 productions.

Figure 3.7: How many archaeology documentary productions overall have you participated in, in the last 10 years?

(n = 139) 100 Q. 2.2 90 80 70 60 52 50 40 30 20 16 20 6 10 2 2 1 0 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 1 < 5 < 10 < 20 < 50 < 100 1% 100 + NUMBER OF ARCHAEOLOGY DOCUMENTARIES PARTICIPATED IN OVER PAST 10 YEARS

Eighty-four percent of respondents most recently participated in an archaeology documentary production within five years prior to the Off the Record survey. Of those, 42% had taken part within 12 months or less prior to the survey.

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Figure 3.8: When was the last time you took part in the production of an archaeology documentary?

(n = 139) 100 Q. 2.1 90 80 70 60 50 42 40 30 16 16 20 12 14 10 0 PERCENTGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTGE In the last 10 years In the last 5 years In the last 12 In the last 6 Currently in months months production TIME SINCE RESPONDENT LAST TOOK PART IN A DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION

A slight majority of survey respondents (54%) stated that they spent up to 1 day (8 hours) on average per year participating in an archaeology documentary production. A significant minority of respondents (28%) declared that they spent up to 1 week (or 40 hours); or up to 2 weeks (or 80 hours) per year (10%). An additional 3% of respondents spent up 4 weeks (160 hours) per year, and 4% of respondents spent over 4 weeks working on or with documentary productions on average per year.

Figure 3.9: On average, how much time each year do you estimate that you spend working on or with archaeology documentary productions?

(n = 139) 100 Q. 2.9 90 80 70 60 54 50 40 28 30 20 10 10 3 4 1

PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 0 1 day or less (8 1 week or less 2 weeks or less 4 weeks or less Over weeks Unanswered hours) (40 hours) (80 hours) (160 hours) TIME SPENT WORKING ON/WITH ARCHAEOLOGY DOCUMENTARIES

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Types of Engagement

The most common role held by survey respondents was as Key Participant (49%), (which is to say that they had an on-screen speaking role such as being interviewed); followed by non-speaking roles as On-screen Participants 24%. This approximately concurred with 66% of respondents stating the most common stage of filmmaking they took part in was production, namely to appear on- camera. Less commonly, but still represented in the survey population, 4% of respondents worked as primary presenters or hosts, and 9% acted as advisors, and 13% held a range of ‘Other’ roles including fixers, editors, and off-camera work.7

Figure 3.10: What roles have you had in archaeology documentary productions?

(n = 139) 24% Participant (e.g. Q. 2.3 present in wide- 49% Key Participant (e.g. Interviewee) 49% Key shots, minor or non- Participant speaking role) (e.g. 24% Participant (e.g. present in wide- 9% Consultant/Advisor Interviewee) shots, minor or non-speaking role) 13% Other (e.g. Field archaeologist behind- 9% Consultant/Advisor the-scenes; fixer; producer; editor) 13% Other (e.g. Field archaeologist 1% Programme… 4% Presenter/Host behind-the-scenes; fixer; producer; editor)

Figure 3.11: What stage of archaeology documentary production have you most often taken part in?

7% Other 7 (n = 139) 2% Other post-production 2 Q. 2.5 1% Editing 1 66% Appearing on-camera 66 4% Production 4 1% Other pre-production 1 1% Location scouting 1 1% Treatment / Script writing 1 12% Background research 12 5% Concept development 5 0 20 40 60 80 100 PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS

7 A possible survey design flaw which emerged in the data was the potential for confusion among respondents in differentiating archaeological from filmmaking roles. As such I suspect the data about roles such as working as a researcher (archaeological versus film/programme), concept development, and location scouting is regrettably unreliable.

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Figure 3.12: What type of archaeology documentary productions have you most often been part of?

Interactive documentary (iDoc) 0 (n = 139) Feature documentary (cinema) 0 Q. 2.7 Other (e.g. animation, VR, etc) 2 Web-series 4 Short film 6 Feature documentary (broadcast) 8 Factual TV one-off 26 Factual TV series 57

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS

The vast majority (83%) of respondents most often participated in factual television programme making (57% in a series, 26% in a one-off). Disappointingly (but as we shall see later in the thesis, not surprisingly), 0% of respondents indicated that they had participated in a documentary film for cinema, or an interactive documentary (iDoc). The predominance of factual TV as the form of non-fiction media production most British archaeologists have experienced has profound implications for archaeology’s relationship with and attitude towards the documentary genre, a theme further developed throughout this thesis.

My findings on the rates of archaeologists’ participation in documentary productions serve two purposes. Firstly, it confirms the viability of the Off the Record data for identifying genuine and relevant patterns and trends in archaeologists’ recent experiences of productions. Secondly, it allows me to generate an average profile of archaeologists’ participation in documentary filmmaking (as characterised from an archaeologist’s perspective). Thus, the average Off the Record respondent has taken part in 2-5 factual TV productions (usually series but some one-offs), within the 12 months prior to the survey, participating as a key-participant (an on-screen speaking role such as being interviewed), appearing on-camera, during the production phase of filmmaking, with their participation taking up to 1 day (8 hours) or work per year. The Off the Record survey also provided an opportunity to those archaeologists whose experiences are more singular, including those who had taken part in over 50 or even over 100 productions within the survey period (2% and 1% respectively), those who spent over 4 weeks per year working on productions (4%), and those who worked as hosts or presenters (4%).

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3.3.2 Problems and concerns raised by archaeologists

A distinct pattern which emerged through respondents’ written answers was that the majority of archaeologists surveyed held either prosaic or negative opinions of archaeology documentaries. When asked to summarise the current state of archaeology documentaries in one word or one phrase (Question 28), the most frequent two words used to characterise archaeology documentaries were “variable” and “mixed”, with 27% of respondents holding (at best) neutral opinions of archaeology documentaries (with descriptions such as “hit and miss” or a “curate’s egg”, see below section 3.3.3). The majority of respondents however (57%), gave words or remarks which were overwhelmingly negative.8

Q. 4.19

Figure 3.13: NVivo generated word cloud of ‘negative’ single-word answers given to Question 28 (“If you could summarise the current state of archaeology documentaries in one word or one phrase it would be:”), from the Off the Record survey, 2016.

A selection of longer comments includes statements such as:

“Pitched at the lowest common denominator.” (R3885).

“Oldest, biggest, ground-breaking!” (R5978).

“Shameful.” (R3756).

8 Some answers given had both positive and negative elements, and were therefore coded as both.

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“Obsessed with glamourous/strange discoveries.” (R4979).

“Less than in the past.” (R7172).

“Second rate and dumbed down.” (R0727).

“Still looking for the next Time Team.” (R7695).

“As long as it’s not on the History Channel it’s probably fine.” (R5629).

“Lacking in research, originality, and quality.” (R9418).

“There’s not enough of them.” (R9213).

It is important to remember of course that these statements are opinions, some indicating personal preferences or tastes as viewers, and some descriptions are of course therefore contradictory – for instance when differing respondents characterised documentaries as both “dull” and “sensationalist” (R4626 and R0298 respectively). Likewise, assumptions that factual TV programmes such as Time Team constitutes documentary is an error that permeates the survey responses. However, what is indisputable is the fact that 84% of respondents who took part in the Off the Record survey – an overwhelming majority – chose to characterise archaeology documentaries (however they define them) prosaically or negatively, and then further suggested archaeology documentaries are generally of poor quality, and poorly represent archaeologists and archaeology.

When asked how they would characterise a “bad” archaeology documentary (Question 21), respondents cited the following as key issues: poor research, rushed fieldwork, factual inaccuracies, hyperbole, distorting or misrepresenting archaeological evidence to serve a storytelling or presenter’s agenda, the use of non-expert presenters (especially any non-archaeologists), sensationalism, over- simplification (also described as ‘dumbing-down’), inaccuracy, treasure-hunting tropes, making modern political inferences, and malpractice (in fieldwork or when working with human remains). Less frequent but still present were criticisms of overly-dramatic music, dramatizations, re-enactments, and poor graphics. If and when blame was attributed, respondents held either presenters, audiences, or fellow archaeologists (who purportedly ‘oversold’ their research) as responsible for shortcomings. As direct examples of ‘bad’ archaeology documentaries, respondents referred to Battlefield Recovery (also called Nazi War Diggers, and

72 Chapter 3 programmes featuring Neil Oliver and Alice Roberts, among others.9 Regarding Oliver and Roberts, a particular sticking point was respondent’s assumptions that these presenters were not archaeologists, and therefore ill equipped to interpret archaeology to audiences. This however is an unfair and incorrect claim: it should be noted that Oliver is in fact an archaeologist, and Roberts is a biological anthropologist with a Ph.D. in palaeopathology (the other ‘bad’ presenters cited by respondents were indeed not archaeologists).

In response to question 16, What personal or professional concerns do you have when working on or with archaeology documentaries (if any)?, the most frequent concern archaeologists had was that they would be misrepresented, particularly occurring during the editing stage of production.10 This included concerns about having ideas or words edited out of context, not being credited fairly for their work (both archaeological and production-based), being forced to follow pre- scripted or staged narratives, or being cut from the production altogether (although some also found this a relief). Respondents cited feeling powerless and distrustful towards those who they thought held sway over such editorial decisions: presenters, directors, producers, production companies, broadcasters and/or occasionally other archaeologists. When storytelling was mentioned, it was cast by respondents as being in opposition to “accuracy” and “fair reporting”. The concern for misrepresentation was also frequently linked with concerns about risks to both the personal and professional reputations of archaeologists.

A selection of comments made by respondents (following Question 16), and stories shared (Question 29) gives a fuller sense of these concerns.11

“There is enormous pressure put on you to say what fits their story even when it is blatantly rubbish that they are trying to get you say. However, if you weaken (and it’s tempting just to shut you up) that is the bit they will use and you will end up on screen appearing like a fool to your

9 Oliver and Roberts are also listed by respondents in answer to Question 22 as exemplars of ‘good’ archaeology documentary programmes, see footnote 12. 10 In the interest of transparency, this question was positioned after a section in the survey addressing the conditions of production including contracts, pay, and editorial rights – a sequence which upon later reflection may have risked the questions leading respondents’ answers. Nonetheless, respondent statements made later in the survey (such as to share a story for Question 29) do confirm that misrepresentation occurring during the editing component of documentary filmmaking was indeed a genuine matter of concern to respondents. 11 Survey quotes are edited for spelling, clarity, and anonymisation purposes. Where this alters or omits original text I have indicated with [brackets].

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colleagues. Also, I am always terrified that I will be misrepresented […] I know how easy it is for an editor to make you swear that black is white by careful editing.” (R3771).

“I had an interview once in which I made a casual comment at the end joking with the interviewer. I added on that I didn't want that quoted as it was a joke. When it went out the only bit of my interview that was used was my joking comment. I was not impressed or happy and now do not trust interviewers.” (R3328).

“Not knowing how you will be edited can be stressful. Often flippant comments, made in the glare of an 'as live' interview are attractive to producers who then use them out of context. Often, when being filmed you do not feel as if you can ask for a re-take to firm up what you were saying or to be less rambling – it’s a worry how you will be perceived professionally – often all of the concern is given to the presenter's performance and not that of the guest.” (R3548).

“There is always a hook – that's fine. But when the hook is written and signed off before the expert is consulted, it's stupid. And on at least two occasions the final edit has been changed to alter what I said and why I said it.” (R4053).

“I recently filmed a documentary with a major channel. They hired me as an expert to discuss the greatest ancient examples from my subject. However, they had already decided on what these examples would be and created the corresponding graphics/reconstructions. This left very little of my own opinion to be expressed. Essentially, they wanted an actor with a degree to validate the script written by their company. There were a great deal of errors and mistakes in their script. I corrected it all as much as possible, but I was still locked into their framework. The filmmakers were frustrated because they had a set show they wanted to produce; I was frustrated because they didn't truly want an expert. I believe this is the true state of documentary film on the large television channels I have worked with […]. The public is not getting archaeology from archaeologists, but archaeology from script writers with archaeologists provided side commentary.” (R3164).

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“Often directorial decisions are well-informed, but last-minute changes are made at the [post-] production stage, and these can be detrimental.” (R4436).

“[One] time I thought I was filming something on the origins of modern humans and the segment reappears in a doc about the Yeti. Once it's in the can who knows where it might end up.” (R7826).

“When working on [a TV series] we were made to put finds back in the trench for the presenter to 'discover' them. My main issue with this practice is that all the items put back were from different strats and therefore was a misleading representation of the archaeological process and the documentary’s 'interpretation' of the evidence.” (R9906).

“The loss of autonomy and control of the output of media/documentaries is very alien to academics... If we don't like peer review of our research, we can always send an article to another journal and retain control. So that is a hurdle. Academic agendas and media agendas are different, and media clearly need to simplify and focus, when academics are trained to show all sides. So that can be uncomfortable. Academics are also trained to eradicate all possible errors by thorough writing/rewriting, while media is all about rapidity and can ignore minor errors. That is also a source of discomfort. Also, I worry that soundbites clipped from a long explanation can make me sound either pretentious or idiotic.” (R3526).

“Working for a commercial unit we get very little say in what the final product will look like. Often documentary film makers don't like the reality of site work in the commercial vs the academic / research world, as we dress in High Vis like construction workers and use big heavy tools rather than brushes. This means that sometimes we give up our time and slow down our pace to be filmed and then they don't use the footage cause it’s not what they expected. We also have to make sure our commercial clients are happy with the publicity and exposure their site will receive. This can limit what we are able to say in films, and sometimes outside researchers are hired to fill in the gaps we can't legally talk about, with information that is usually hypothetical and baseless. All of this concerns me cause although we usually come away from documentaries looking good and knowledgeable sometimes the key messages are misinterpreted and there is nothing we can do about it but hope that it

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doesn't damage our personal careers and the reputation of our company.” (R6238).

“The cutting-room floor can lead to over-simplification. Programme makers often want to tell a particular story and like things in fairly black and white; whereas archaeologists favour shades of grey, nuance and a variety of degrees of probability rather than certainty.” (R3172).

Although concerns about being personally misrepresented through editing were the most common, respondents were also worried about archaeological malpractice occurring during or resulting from documentary productions. This ranged from productions promoting metal-detecting or encouraging night- hawking, overemphasis of artefacts or excavation rather than other types of archaeology, damage done to sites by negligent film crews, mistreatment of human remains, and excavations being rushed and poorly recorded in order to fit in with production schedules. Additionally, respondents also raised issue with having their work-time wasted, having footage of them re-used outside the agreed programme, sexism and ageism, not being fairly paid, and film crews taking ‘stock footage’ of excavations or sites without consent.

When asked about their experiences of participating in the editing stage of documentary filmmaking, 88% of respondents had rarely or never been invited to review the edit, and 83% had rarely or never been given editorial rights in a production in which they participated. When asked if archaeologists should be given editorial rights, a slight majority (50%) stated ‘always’ or ‘usually’ (in comparison to 40% ‘sometimes’, and 8% ‘rarely’ or ‘never’).

Figure 3.14: Comparison of rates of review and editorial rights respondents have when participating in productions

How often are you invited to review archaeology 2 4 5 18 70 3 documentaries before their release?

How often are you given editorial rights over 13 6 11 72 7 archaeology documentaries?

Always Usually Sometimes 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS (n = 139) Rarely Never N/A Q. 3.11, 3.13

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Figure 3.15: Comparison of opinions on review and editorial rights respondents feel they ‘should’ have in productions

How often do you think archaeologists should be given editorial rights over archaeology 21 29 40 5 31 documentaries?

How often do you think archaeologists should be 18 20 41 13 6 0 given veto rights over archaeology documentaries?

Always Usually Sometimes 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Rarely Never N/A PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS (n = 139) Q. 3.15, 3.17

However, despite the clear concerns respondents had about filmmakers’ conduct and archaeologists’ rights as participants, a portion of survey respondents did acknowledge a need to respect filmmakers’ storytelling expertise and creative rights. For instance, when asked how often archaeologists should be granted veto rights respondents were more on the fence, with only 38% stating ‘always’ or ‘usually’, while 41% felt it was ‘sometimes’ appropriate, and 19% stating ‘rarely’ or ‘never’. Again, a selection of concerns raised (Question 16), comments (following Questions 12-15), and stories shared (Question 29) indicates the conflicted and diverse opinions respondents had about their roles and rights regarding the editing process:

“There is a crying need for some form of effective peer-review.” (R3756).

“Production companies rarely seem bothered about the facts, misrepresentation of work can seriously affect careers and livelihood, so there should be a veto under normal circumstances.” (R4053).

“Filmmakers for TV are responsible to commissioners so it may not be possible to give those rights.” (R0623).

“I am concerned of film only people who do not respect the archaeology as a factual medium but also, equally, of archaeologists who are only concerned with the facts at the expense of creative freedom. It is a difficult line to tread.” (R5629).

“Censorship?” (R6030).

“[…] I went through many hours of video (interviews, other activities), the vast majority of which of course never made it on screen. This was a source of frustration but also an insight into the world of filming – all

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those takes were akin to academics' rough drafts and abandoned paragraphs.” (R3526).

“[In my capacity as an expert presenter employed by the production] I remember having to interview someone […], about an episode in Anglo- Saxon history. She'd been selected as an 'expert' on this subject by production staff without consulting me […]. When we began recording, it became very clear that she didn't really know anything about it, but knew how to tell a good story. Her version was inaccurate in countless ways and it was incredibly hard to deal with on camera. Unfortunately, I didn't know the production staff well and it was a difficult situation, with content to film and no alternative to hand. You have to rely on getting the right story through to production staff and simply hoping that they use the right information in voice-over or something, but you have no control. Unfortunately, all the viewers think that you do have control, over everything – where to film, who to interview, which topics to discuss.” (R5880).

“My experience to date has largely been a favourable one, but as 'talent' you often do have more 'power' and also the productions I have worked on we agree that my input will be listened to – however as indicted above the product is different from an archaeological papers and other objectives prevail – luring the archaeologists of the future or raising the profile of archaeology is not always achieved by means that academics deem best – so there needs to be room to discuss and explore the tensions that invariably develop from time to time i.e. compromise needs to be considered. Personally, I have found that at times colleagues can be dismissive of participation in documentary presentation and very judgmental of out-put – equally being a female presenter has obvious gender bias challenges, one of the greatest being age.” (R8514).

Another problem raised by survey respondents was concern regarding whether production companies could be expected to provide funding for archaeological research, publishing, and conservation. Again, a trend among respondent answers indicate a lack of agreed standards with media counterparts on the matter:

“I will share an observation. Since the demise of Time Team we have lost TV progs that do archaeology. Nowadays the TV companies are parasitic

78 Chapter 3 on current projects. There is little real money going into the archaeology.” (R6616).

“The big concern I have, at the moment, is the degree to which post-ex and publication is taken seriously in projects which are led and financed by documentary production. There is a danger that we're heading back to the early days […] where little concerted effort was made to ensure that sites were properly written up. [...] There's a project I've been working on for several years – a community archaeology project financed by a TV production outfit […] A lot of work has been done, and a lot of footage shot, but despite repeated warnings and cajoling from site supervisor (myself) and several of the other professional archaeologists involved, no resources have yet been made available for post-ex and/or publication. Finds & paper archives are building up, and it's starting to look like the producer has little intention of fulfilling his promises to fund the report. Two of us have been particularly insistent that the producer needed to take post-ex seriously. We don't think it's a coincidence that they appear to be going ahead doing more digging without our involvement […] And the damage is to the reputations of the archaeologists involved, and the relations between media and archaeology sectors.” (R1303).

“A film crew, involved in [an archaeological programme], came to work in the area for which I was county archaeologist, for a week. They made verbal commitments before arrival about the project, including undertaking timely publication, and adequate reinstatement and stabilisation of the eroding site, and these were confirmed by exchange of email. Once on site, they dug the site pretty much at random, without a coherent plan or appropriate levels of recording. They left without adequately reinstating and stabilising the site, which eroded at an accelerated pace. It was not published timeously. I sincerely regretted having given permission for the work, which caused significant political and archaeological problems.” (R6929).

“I agreed to work on one particular documentary on the understanding that the project I was working on would be promoted, and that it would be understood I had undertaken research to a certain level (I'd been working on this project for a year). The programme would then expand upon the existing research, paying for stable isotope testing, facial

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reconstruction of skeletons and so on. What actually happened was that the production company took my research, did not intend to acknowledge my involvement in the research or even their programme, and intended to make it appear as though their presenters had conducted all the research themselves. Eventually, after much arguing, I managed to secure a brief inclusion in the closing credits of the programme. Furthermore, the skeletal remains being utilised for filming were grossly mistreated. Bone samples were taken on camera using inappropriate and non-standard techniques (rather than cutting a small bone sample, the whole bone was unceremoniously snapped in half using a circular saw). The unused samples were never returned to us. The results from stable isotope testing were never passed over to our project. Skeletons used for facial reconstruction had their dentition superglued into incorrect tooth sockets, severely damaging the integrity of the bone. No acknowledgement for these actions, or apology was ever issued. In short, I was misled, extremely disappointed, and involvement in the documentary had caused significant damage to a nationally important archaeological resource, with no thought or respect afforded to the human remains. This experience has significantly informed how I deal with TV production companies now.” (R8889).

“I have been lucky enough to be involved in ground-breaking documentaries at sites [across Europe]. Each were memorable experiences which helped my fund my research on these topics. So, I am a fan of filming archaeology and producing documentaries. What we all know however is how difficult archaeology is to get funding – archaeological organisations and individuals are poor. Many of the production companies who fund or part fund archaeological projects do so by giving only small amounts of money to the archaeologists involved (or nothing at all) and when the programme is made and aired in the UK, the rights are then sold to others to distribute abroad. This can generate huge revenue for the production house and TV channel, but nothing goes to the archaeologist – whose research project it may have been to begin with. I think we as archaeologists need to change our attitude to this. Our skills and talents are important and our research and the sites we work on should be seen as intellectual property and we should benefit more.” (R7548).

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Beyond the Off The Record survey the extent to which production companies are funding archaeological research remains an unknown, with archaeological market surveys thus far failing to acknowledge or discern the scope of this economic relationship (e.g. Aitchison 2017). As is evident from Off the Record testimonies however, these funding deals do indeed appear to be being made between production companies and archaeology projects, and there remains a lack of consistency and clarity regarding the terms of these deals, particularly productions’ financial responsibilities to archaeologists and archaeological projects. This failure to reach a shared understanding directly impacts archaeologists’ received expectations of and attitudes towards documentary filmmaking. Respondents readily acknowledged this themselves, with 67% feeling they did not adequately understand the nature of documentary filmmaking, 60% feeling the inverse was also true, and 65% subsequently desiring media training and support.

Figure 3.16: Comparison of respondents’ opinions on their own media literacy; and on documentarists' archaeological literacy

100 Q. 4.11, 4.15 (n = 139) 67 60

50 32 23 6 8 3 0 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS OF PERCENTAGE Do you think UK archaeologists adequately understand the nature of documentary filmmaking and the workings of the wider media industries? Do you think archaeology documentary filmmakers adequately understand the nature and workings of archaeology?

Figure 3.17: Respondent views on the need for media training and support

100 Q. 4.13 (n = 139) 80 65 60

40 24 20 10 1 0

PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS OF PERCENTAGE Yes No Unsure Unanswered Do you think UK archaeologists need better training and support in order to work on or in archaeology documentaries?

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“I am concerned that as a profession we have poor understanding of film making, communication theory and media studies. As a result, we can be quite naive about the process and not use it well.” (R8876).

“It would be helpful to have access to information about how documentary filmmaking is organised and funded, to clarify the priorities of filmmakers.” (R6926).

“It would be helpful to have a body you can turn to for advice... Also a specialist archaeological body built along the lines of the Science Media Centre might be useful.” (R9846).

“[Yes] But this should be provided by the production companies.” (R6623).

“I’ve never seen any CPD [Continuing Professional Development accreditation] offered in this but it’s a great idea.” (R3771).

“Working with CIfA on this would be a good start.” (R3743).

“[Media] training […] should be an obligatory part of university courses.” (R6238).

3.3.3 Aspirations, hopes, and desires for documentary held by archaeologists

In comparison to the 84% of neutral or negative answers respondents gave when asked to summarise the current state of archaeology documentaries in one word or one phrase (Question 28), 13% instead gave positive characterisations. These included descriptions ranging from “passable” and “not bad” to “healthy”, “improving”, “enticing”, “excellent” and “a continuing success”.

Q. 4.19

Figure 3.18: NVivo generated word cloud of ‘positive’ single-word answers given to Question 28 (“If you could summarise the current state of archaeology documentaries in one word or one phrase it would be:”), from the Off the Record survey, 2016.

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When asked how they would characterise a “good” archaeology documentary (Question 22), respondents nominated good quality research, coupled with relevant expertise held by like-minded archaeologist presenters, as the two most desired traits. In respondents’ views, these two characteristics could then ensure other positive qualities in a production, such as being engaging, accurate, allowing for interesting and informative storytelling, and treating audiences intelligently (listed here roughly in order of frequency). Less frequent characteristics also mentioned by respondents included productions covering up- to-date debates, and having balanced reporting, good production values, and good quality music and visuals (referred to as GCI, ‘camera-work’, ‘photography’, or simply being ‘beautiful’). As named examples of ‘good’ archaeology documentaries, respondents cited Time Team, Horizon, and programmes featuring Michael Wood, David Attenborough, Mary Beard, Neil Oliver, and Alice Roberts.12 Additionally and overall, so-called ‘celebrity’ archaeologists (and aligned ‘heritage professionals’ in some respondent’s words) were seen to be positive for archaeology by acting as “ambassadors for the subject” (R7816), promoting archaeology to a public audience, with the perceived beneficial consequences of attracting project funding and recruiting university students to archaeology.

Figure 3.19: Respondent opinion on the benefit of 'celebrity' archaeologists

In your opinion, are 'celebrity' archaeologists good for (n = 139) Q. 4.9 archaeology? 100 80 56 60 40 31 20 11 2 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE

When asked their opinion on what the main purpose of an archaeology documentary should be, respondents overwhelmingly suggested it should ‘inform’, followed by ‘educate’ and ‘entertain’, ‘engage’, ‘interest’, ‘disseminate’, ‘research’, ‘present’, and less frequently, tell ‘stories’ to audiences (n=132). That

12 Oliver and Roberts were also named in reference to “bad” archaeology documentaries (Question 21, see footnote 9) – again, reminding us of how greatly opinions can vary.

83 Chapter 3 it should do this ‘accurately’ or ‘factually’ was also frequently expressed (although interestingly more traditional documentary genre descriptors such as ‘truth,’ ‘honesty’, and ‘realism’ were only mentioned in a total of seven answers, or 5% of responses).

Q. 4.6

Figure 3.20: NVivo generated word cloud of 50 most common words mentioned in answer to an archaeology documentary’s purpose, (Question 20 “In your opinion, what should be the main purpose of an archaeology documentary?”), from the Off the Record survey, 2016, (n = 132).

Again, a representative selection of respondents’ long-form answers about their views on the main purpose of archaeology documentaries (Question 20), supplemented by relevant stories shared (Question 29), provide two clear and opposing viewpoints. Firstly, a majority of respondents appear to hold the view that archaeology documentaries should primarily function as an extension of archaeologists’ professional goals of dissemination of findings, and public outreach and educational prerogatives. Many who held these views agreed that this should be achieved by encasing the educative goals within an entertaining format, with some citing Reithianism as the model to follow.13 For example:

“Communication to the public.” (R6390).

“To disseminate accurate and interesting archaeological information to the public.” (R6929).

13 See 5.5.1 for further discussion of Reithianism and documentary.

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“Public engagement and dissemination of information outside the research community.” (R8889).

“Public outreach and engagement.” (R7731).

“To present a factual account of archaeological processes and discoveries and to promote the field of archaeological endeavour.” (R1870).

“To explain the archaeology as accurately and truthfully as possible, but in an accessible and interesting way.” (R9846).

“Recruitment of students to University, informing an educated public about the past, supporting the teaching profession in enthusing KS2 in primary schools, supporting learning officers in local museums. Oh also, advertising revenue for TV companies.” (R3383).

“To educate, inform and entertain! To make people fascinated and gripped by the mysteries and commonplaces of what really went on in the past. To find out what happened and why. To make links between our lives now and people in the past. To make the past seem real.” (R5880)

“Reith: Educate, inform, and entertain. Time Team excelled in balancing all three.” (R3160).

“Inform, educate, and entertain (Reith got it right!)” (R0298).

“To inform and entertain. In that order.” (R7941).

“Information not entertainment.” (R8866).

However, a secondary trend which emerged among a minority of respondents countered this Reithian-leaning attitude, either via cynical readings of documentary as an exercise in financial gain, or in favour of documentary as a form of art or culture. For example, among these respondents some stated that the main purpose of an archaeology documentary was:

“To make a saleable product.” (R0998).

“To inform in an entertaining and interesting way, but one should remember that production companies have one purpose: to make money.” (R8939).

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“There shouldn't be one main purpose. They are cultural activities and should be diverse in purpose, commissioning, audience etc.” (R3890).

“To tell a good story.” (R9893).

“Far beyond communication or engagement. The purpose of TV is pleasure and the idea of community. Shared cultural experience. TV archaeology needs to reassure us of our sense of the world while also giving us the pleasure of surprise and discovery. Documentary more broadly is about critically commenting on the world in some way – and problematizing the relationship between film and lived life.” (R0623).

However, in keeping with the majority of respondents’ perception that the purpose of archaeology documentaries is primarily to ‘inform’ and ‘educate’ public audiences, when asked about their personal motivations for participating in archaeology documentaries (Question 19), the vast majority of respondents maintained a concern for creating positive publicity for archaeology, promoting their organisations, and literal dissemination of their research findings:

Q. 4.5

Figure 3.21: NVivo generated word cloud of 50 most common words mentioned in answer to motives for participation (Question 19: “What motivates you to work on or with archaeology documentaries?”, from the Off the Record survey, 2016, (n = 133).

Beyond promotional motivations respondents also mentioned being motivated to participate by financial incentives, job demands, career aspirations, awareness raising, a sense of vocational duty, gaining access to restricted sites, and simple

86 Chapter 3 enjoyment or even love for both archaeology and filmmaking. Again, a brief selection of respondents’ comments paints a full spectrum of the range of motivations archaeologists have for participating in documentary filmmaking:

“To promote archaeology generally and to present work/research to the public as a lot of research is funded by public funded research grants.” (R5978).

“Disseminating knowledge to the public. I feel a duty as an archaeologist to pass on my learning, and love of archaeology, to the public.” (R9846).

“[I] want to share knowledge of and understanding of the past, want to contribute to public life, I think it's important that actual archaeologists take part in these documentaries, it might be good for my career although I doubt it.” (R7865).

“A commitment to sharing understanding of the past.” (R6623).

“Financial reward.” (R8376).

“Networking, profile increase, interest.” (R9418).

“The honest answer: vanity and the chance to travel to exotic locations. The professional answer: to advance the public benefit that might obtain from my work.” (R4445).

“I have been lucky that working with TV production companies has allowed me to work on a number of high profile sites. The power of TV can unlock doors for archaeologists to research places and sites that would be otherwise difficult to access.” (R7558).

“It’s always exciting to be filmed and think people might see you on TV.” (R5902).

“Telling a big audience about the Palaeolithic. I enjoy it, it's fun.” (R3124).

“I enjoy the process of film-making, I particularly enjoy the story-telling aspect of this.” (R3394).

“I love film and TV and I think it presents us with endless opportunities to make and remake the world.” (R0623).

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Although only a minority of respondents (24 in total, or 17%) chose to share positive stories about their experiences working on documentary productions (Question 29), those who did further corroborate that respondents generally aspire to participate in archaeology documentaries which privilege archaeological epistemologies, demonstrate thorough research, working with like-minded presenters and crews, and which align with their own goals for investigating and promoting archaeology. These qualities made archaeologists feel appreciated, understood, safe, and keen to take part in archaeology documentary productions. Respondents suggest that these qualities also made the productions easier and more satisfying for the filmmakers as well.

“My best experience involved working with a presenter who wished to hear and understand what I had to say on a programme that featured several guest experts – my research was not subsumed into the main presenter's talk. I felt that my contribution was appreciated.” (R5240).

“I think my most enduring memories are of just excavating and having a chat with maybe Phil Harding or Mick Aston about the archaeology which was then filmed quietly. No bells and whistles or scripts, just discussing the archaeology as it stood at the time, the 'real' side of a dig.” (R2849).

“Can I blend two experiences? One film company simply put the programme presenter (an archaeologist) and I in front of some objects and said 'Have a conversation'. So we did, and the result was a really satisfying segment. Another said 'To make it easier for you, we have written you a shooting script to follow'. I tried, but the words were not mine (they were not even good English), and after several takes I had to insist on doing it in my own words. The moral is to trust the featured 'specialist'. They may not do or say exactly what you expected, but the result will be more accurate, more authentic and will probably take much less time to film.” (R4274).

“One can tell whether the programme is going to turn out well by the conversations one has with the presenter off camera. If they want to carry on talking about archaeology / history then that’s a good sign. If they ignore you and talk to the camera crew about other things that's bad.” (R7124).

“I was approached by a producer of a documentary on a key figure in the history of archaeology, initially for some background information, and

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then to appear as an 'expert' interviewee. The producer had clearly done a certain amount of research, and although I sometimes felt I was being used as an unpaid research assistant, there was a clear interest in understanding the material thoroughly on the part of those making the documentary. Filming ran over-time, but my organisation was being paid by the hour for filming in our collections, and the outcome was that we added a small, but significant amount to our collections budget, which had a positive outcome (we bought some much-needed storage materials). So in this case, I felt that we got some real benefit from the experience. I'm not sure how useful the exercise was in promoting our organisation, as the credits rolled too fast for us to be noticeable, but the end product was excellent and we could all be proud of it. The producer also managed to secure interviews with pretty much all the available experts in this particular field, and as a result, it felt like an effective documentary – which was also very entertaining. I've watched it several times since, and would recommend it to any of my students – the sign of something that has worked. So this was a very positive experience all round, largely due to the efforts and ethos of those involved in the production.” (R5689).

3.3.4 Other survey findings and observations

Overall, it is evident then that the vast majority of survey respondents effectively consider archaeology documentaries to be an extension to their own professional goals and methods for research dissemination, outreach, teaching, and public engagement. This is particularly apparent in the fact that respondents’ most valued characteristic of a ‘good’ archaeology documentary is its quality of archaeological research (as opposed to other research relevant to the narrative or production). It is equally telling that most respondent opinions on the main ‘purpose’ of an archaeology documentary is that it should ‘inform’ (or ‘educate’, ‘engage’, ‘disseminate’, ‘present’ etc.). Such expectations would not be out of place in relation to essay marking criteria, peer review publication guidelines, or a public lecture.

Following this attitude, respondents repeatedly highlight a desire for documentaries to report archaeology with ‘accuracy’. Yet confounding this, archaeologists’ use of the term of ‘accuracy’ shows it to be an ambiguous and loaded term with a range of prescribed meanings. Respondents use the term

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‘accuracy’ as a synonym for being ‘representative’, ‘fair’, factually correct, realistic, or favourable – with each of these terms also representing different expectations among different respondents (applied invariably to people, projects, sites, organisations, sectors, activities, or archaeology as a discipline). ‘Accuracy’ is also at times defined by respondents to be in opposition to perceived stereotyping, clichés, simplifications, and storytelling. Evidently then, when it comes to archaeology documentaries, ‘accuracy’ is a far more a problematic term for archaeologists than commonly assumed. Thus, when asked if archaeology documentaries represented archaeology ‘accurately’ (Question 17), 41% of respondents stated they did not, and 31% were unsure. Yet in contrast, when asked if archaeology documentaries represented archaeology ‘fairly’ (Question 18), the inverse was true, with 44% stated documentary gave fair representations, and 28% unsure.

Figure 3.22: Comparison of respondent views on accuracy and fairness in archaeology documentary representation

Documentary Representation of Archaeology: (n = 139) Accuracy and Fairness Q. 4.1, 4.3 100

80

60 44 41 40 31 28 26 28 20 0 2.8 0 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE Yes No Unsure Unanswered Overall, do you think archaeology documentaries represent archaeology accurately? Overall, do you think archaeology documentaries represent archaeology fairly?

Respondents’ comments about whether archaeology documentaries represent archaeology accurately (Question 17), also indicates a pressing need for archaeologists to rethink what we mean by using ‘accuracy’ as criterion for assessing documentary:

“Although the archaeology is, on the whole, represented accurately, the process often isn't which has its pros and cons: it brings archaeology to a wide audience, but gives construction companies the impression that it should be completed within three days.” (R7687).

“Massively inaccurately but I think it's mostly harmless...” (R7865).

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“Within the scope of filming for TV then yes. Obviously it cannot be 100% real but it can be near as dammit.” (R2849).

“But archaeologists are bad at representing archaeology accurately in our professional and academic reporting.” (R4445).

“If accurately means, how archaeology wants to see itself...” (R3383).

“It depends on what you mean by accurately. I think there is no way of representing archaeology 'accurately' – there may be many possible ways of representing it.” (R6948).

“I do not think archaeology is one entity that can be represented accurately. Individual documentaries capture some aspects of the discipline. Same would be true for any discipline – it's a large and complex field.” (R8310).

Likewise, respondents frequently conflate documentary and non-fiction television formats – principally factual TV – as being the same genre, causing confusion about what should be expected from these differing filmmaking methods and media. To be fair however, this is less a mistake on the part of archaeologists than a reflection of the manner in which in British documentary as a genre has largely been subsumed by television, and archaeology with it. Likewise, debates about the challenges and responsibilities of representing reality in a way that is fair, honest, and truthful go to the heart of documentary debate in both scholarship and practice, and have led to range of (sometimes opposing) filmmaking philosophies and approaches to capturing and representing reality on film. Both these issues are further discussed in Chapter Five, section 5.4.

3.3.5 Concluding thoughts

The Off the Record survey serves as evidence that participation in filmmaking – factual TV if not documentary – is indeed a real sub-sector of archaeological activity, and a significant form of expertise for some individual archaeologists, but an activity that is often mischaracterised, misunderstood, and too little valued by archaeology as a discipline. Whilst respondents hold a broad range of attitudes towards what they define as documentary productions – and so no single opinion can be taken as representative – all views shared were rooted in archaeologists’ genuine lived experiences, and therefore even those that might be read as atypical deserve serious treatment. The fact that the majority of respondents’

91 Chapter 3 experiences of and therefore attitudes towards documentary were negative, combined with the real concerns held about damage to personal and professional reputations and to the archaeological resource, together indicate the seriousness with which this topic deserves to be taken. On the other hand, despite these problems, respondents still held positive hopes and aspirations for their participation in documentary filmmaking, also shows a desire and willingness to improve the relationship between documentary and archaeology.

A confounding factor in the relationship is the fact that that the survey respondents’ expectations of documentary appear to have very little to do with the genre of itself, its conventions, or its role in society. A clear example of this is the regular references made to Time Team by respondents, despite the fact that Time Team is not a documentary, nor do its creators refer to it as one (e.g. see Taylor 1998). Consequently, we can see how many respondents not only confuse documentary with other genres such as factual TV, but they go on to expect attributes of documentary that it never really had, and hold expectations it can therefore never fulfil14. Meanwhile the real benefits and strengths of documentary such as the unique authorial voice ascribed to the genre, documentary’s contribution to the arts, the value of cinematic “truth”, and documentary’s journalistic and social justice mission to ‘speak truth to power’ and challenge the status quo in society – all go largely ignored by archaeologists. The question that must follow then, is why is there such a gap in expectation and understanding between archaeology and documentary filmmaking? What caused it, and why does it persist? Surveys can provide answers to who, what, where, and when – but not necessarily how or why. The following two chapters seek to address the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of archaeology’s conflicted relationship with documentary filmmaking by exploring the history and changing definitions of archaeology documentaries.

14 The inverse is also true: respondents appear to expect factual TV to perform documentary and journalistic functions. As factual TV is not the primary focus of this thesis I do not explore the implications of this further, but this would be another worthy topic for future research.

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Chapter 4 Off the historical record I : archaeology and documentary filmmaking between the 1890s and 1940s

The cinema began as documentary and the documentary as cinema.

Jean Louis Comolli (1999: 36).

4.1 Introduction

The historical overview that spans this and the next chapter, explores and reframes how we understand archaeology’s historical relationship with the documentary film genre. Although previous histories of archaeological communication or filmmaking have been advanced (see Kulik 2007; Morgan 2012), they have been necessarily brief and arguably predetermined rather than exploratory in scope. Instead, in this chapter, I step back and begin by reassessing how we define and evaluate archaeology documentaries, first from a range of archaeological perspectives (also see section 2.2 and Appendix A), then according to documentary scholarship and practice. I advocate using Bill Nichols’ four-part criteria for documentary status and adopt it as a framework for mapping out the early history of archaeology in non-fiction film, from the earliest actualitès of the 1890s, through to the arrival of what I have identified as the earliest known archaeology documentary, in 1935. Chapter 5 spans the 1930s through to the 2010s, and takes as its subject the treatment of archaeology documentary in cinema, television, and digital forms. As this history also spans a broad range of media and film movements, I ask the reader to bear with my various digressions as I explain the wider archaeological, documentary, and cinema contexts as necessary, the relevance of which will (hopefully) become apparent as this account progresses. By positioning archaeology’s history within non-fiction film alongside the history of the emergence of the documentary genre, and by identifying and contextualising the overlaps and connections between the two, we can finally and fully begin to appreciate the variety and complexity of archaeology documentaries – as well as the pivotal role archaeologists have played in their development. The underlying aim of these two chapters then, is to advance a way for archaeologists to better understand and define archaeology documentaries ‘in situ’.

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4.1.1 A word on primary source material

As discussed previously, there is a dearth of knowledge about the historic relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. In fairness, I suspect our gap in knowledge not is so much due to lack of interest from archaeologists or film historians, but rather the simple lack of access to the primary source materials, namely the original celluloid films, and for broadcast works, Beta-max or VHS tapes. For much of the twentieth century the only way to search and evaluate the material necessary for a study of archaeology on film would have been to negotiate access to and scour the film, television, and private archival materials, watching in real time and in person. That is also assuming the material and playback equipment had survived and been preserved in a watchable format. Whilst such an intensive project would have been of value (and no doubt still could be), the expense, labour, and duration of such a study would take a lifetime. Fortunately, over the past 10 years film and television archives (e.g. BBC Archives, BFI, and British Pathé), and museums (e.g. Wellcome Library, Pitt Rivers Museum, British Museum, University of Pennsylvania Museum, see also Filming Antiquity), have begun to not only digitise their collections for preservation, but to make them publicly and/or freely available, either online or on-site. Likewise, old television programmes and films are being restored and remastered for DVD releases, re-broadcast, or digitally streamed – becoming available to international audiences and researchers. Thus, there are now bounteous offerings of new and old archaeological films and programmes available to be studied and considered afresh, with more made available every year.

4.1.2 Revisiting how archaeologists define archaeology documentaries

Whilst I maintain that a category of ‘archaeology documentary’ is a necessity to be able to identify, group, and study the history of documentaries about archaeology, I reject archaeologists’ claims that this category should be classified as distinct a sub-genre of documentary, with its own further sub-sub-genre categorisation, as presented in Chapter 2. Attempts to do this have only confounded our understanding of the form by removing it from its pre-existing scholarly, historic, and industry contexts. Over the course of the following two chapters I will show how – beyond their shared archaeological subject matter – there are simply too many diverse modes and models of archaeology documentaries to be able to meet the requirements for sub-genre status (i.e., by exhibiting recurring settings, plots, character types, cinematic techniques, etc.).

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As both an archaeologist and a filmmaker I instead propose that any documentary which takes as its subject questions about the material human past and/or its study through the discipline of archaeology, can be considered an archaeology documentary (or perhaps it would be better to think of it as an archaeologically relevant documentary).

That said, for the sake of brevity I have in this thesis adopted a conservative definition of archaeology regarding the films included here, restricting myself to archaeological content that was (to the best of my knowledge) captured by the filmmaker as they understood it to be archaeological. This has led to an unintended emphasis on films with stereotypical visual archaeological content such as imagery of archaeological sites, excavations, laboratory work, or experimental archaeology. I have chosen to exclude films that have later proven (or may prove to be) of indirect archaeological relevance, such as films that have more of an ethnographic, architectural, art historic, or scientific bearing.1 Also excluded are films that use archaeological imagery or objects as set dressings or backdrops, which have been studied regarding their contribution to the discipline elsewhere (e.g. see Solomon 2001; Michelakis and Wyke et al. 2013; Moser 2001; 2014b). I hope that future research will broaden our understanding of archaeology documentary to consider a more inclusive definition of archaeology – for which this thesis is but a starting point. In Chapter Two (2.2) we considered definitions of the archaeology documentary from an archaeological perspective – but what of the parameters defining the documentary genre?

4.1.3 How documentary theorists define documentary

Defining documentary has always been one of the genre’s greatest challenges, and many documentary theorists and filmmakers have offered their own views on what makes documentary distinct as a film genre, key among them Grierson (1926-1963), Ward (2005), Winston (2000; 2017a); Nichols (2010; 2016; 2017); and Renov (1999; 2004). The terminology established by documentary theorist Bill Nichols’ has proved particularly durable not only in film scholarship but across the film and television industries as well. For this reason, I have adopted

1 For example, for ethnography, some such films would include Regnault’s films of Wolof pottery making at the Paris Exposition Ethnographie de l’Alfique Occientale (1895); Alfred Haddon’s films of Torres Strait Islander fire-making techniques and dance (1898); and Baldwin Spencer and Alfred Haddon’s films of Aranda dance ceremonies (1901). For a discussion of these films see MacDougall 1998: 139).

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Nichols’ criteria as a useful starting point for determining how the films discussed in these chapters qualify for documentary status (see 2017: 94). Nichols delineates four essential criteria films must contain to be considered documentary.

Firstly, documentaries must exhibit indexical documentation (also described as photographic realism). This is to say they must exhibit “the capacity to record visual [and later audio] phenomenon with great fidelity” (Nichols 2016: 17). In other words, they must present something real (accepting that the boundary between the real and fictional in documentary is ever blurred – another ongoing debate in the genre).

Tied in to the first criterion, documentaries also need a second more artistic quality: poetic experimentation (previously described as modernist fragmentation, Nichols 2016: 20). Poetic experimentation privileges the filmmaker’s way of seeing over that of the camera’s ability to record accurately – a characteristic of the genre inherited from the avant-garde movement. For example, Nichols explains how poetic experimentation enabled early documentarists to differentiate their work from the “cruder” scientific experiments, actualités, and news reels that gone before them:

“The empirical ability of film to produce a photographic record of what it recorded struck many of these artists as a handicap. If a perfect copy was all that was desired, what room was left for the artists’ desire to see the world anew? A film technician would do.” (Nichols 2017: 95; see also 2016: 14).

The third criterion of documentary is narrative storytelling. As well as verbal or text narration, narrative can also be achieved through the application of cinematic grammar such as parallel editing, camera lens choice, framing, music, lighting, and so forth (2017: 96). This by no means implies narrative structures must be fabricated or clichéd – a narrative sequence could follow the progression (or inversion) of time, it could be thematic or artistic, it could be driven by argument, questions or character development, and so forth. But the subject (and viewer) must end up somewhere different to where they began – by the end of the story they must be changed.

Nichols’ final criterion for a films inclusion in the documentary genre is the demonstration of rhetorical address:

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“Documentary film is a rhetorical art. Like the orator of old, the documentarian’s concern is to win an audience’s assent, not serve as an “information transfer” device.” (Nichols 2016: 155; see also 2017: 102).

Such rhetoric can be expressed literally through voice-over narration, as well as subtly through framing, editing techniques, intertitles, and sound design. Rhetoric also allows space for the uniqueness of an authorial cinematic voice – like the fingerprint of a film – usually made by the director (the author, or auteur). Authorial rhetoric is another of documentary’s defining and most attractive qualities appreciated by film scholars and specifically sought by production companies, televisions’ commissioning editors, and critics.

Once the documentary status of a production has been determined, archaeology documentaries can be sub-categorized according to their specific documentary characteristics, again using a common vocabulary provided by Nichols. Nichols categorizes documentaries into ‘modes’ based on their use of different cinematic techniques to construct different types of documentary stories. These include the poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative modes – the titles more or less summing up their characteristics (for a summary of Nichols’ modes see Appendix D.1). These six modes each emerged via distinct historic documentary movements (some of which will be discussed in this chapter), and have since persisted in industry and scholarship as enduring terms for understanding and communicating between scholars and practitioners about documentaries. Nichols also proposes sub-categories of non-fiction film models that operate within these documentary modes, including investigative reporting, diary, advocacy, exploration, sociology, biography, first-person essays, ethnography, history, poetry, and testimonial models (for a summary of Nichols’ models see Appendix D.2). Neither modes nor models are mutually exclusive: for instance, while a single film might privilege one, it will usually hybridize and make use of others as well.

By applying Nichols’ criteria and terminology to archaeology documentaries I aim to redefine archaeologists’ understanding of ‘archaeology documentary’ as a category that includes works which are not bounded by medium nor industry (e.g. television), which can harmonize with documentary scholarship and film and the television industries, and which allows for a much more diverse corpus of archaeology documentaries to be appraised – many for the first time.

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4.1.4 Historical survey scoping

Although the main focus of this thesis is the relationship between archaeology and documentary specific to the UK, as we shall see, many archaeology documentary productions are in both their production and distribution phases transgressive of national borders, languages, time periods, and technologies. Therefore, this historical overview is necessarily broad in chronological and international in scope. The films discussed here have been chosen because through innovation, impact, or as representative examples they are deserving of attention. They include little known or unknown titles within the archaeological literature, as well as famous and infamous productions. Some are the earliest examples that can be found of their form, and so can possibly be understood as precedents to later productions or developments. Importantly, it must be stressed that this selection is not intended as a prescriptive canon for the history of archaeology documentary filmmaking, but rather to give a taste of the full corpus of archaeology documentaries possible, and in doing so a more comprehensive view of the broad spectrum of the relationship(s) between archaeology and documentary filmmaking, and how these have developed through time.

4.1.5 Chapter outline

I have chosen to present this historical account in a chronological sequence, although I acknowledge that such an approach can be problematic. As film theorists Ward (2005: 22), Elsaesser (2016: 23), and Nichols (2016: 234) have persuasively argued: documentary as a genre has not developed in a genealogical or evolutionary manner, instead shifting trends for certain styles and approaches to filmmaking as well as the roles of technologies and industry are “dialectically inter-related” with differing elements either dominant, inert, or re-emergent at different times in different places (Bruzzi, quoted in Ward 2005: 27-8). Likewise, the developing relationship between documentary and archaeology is not a tidy step-by-step narrative easily demarcated by chapters of progress. However, as this account is the first attempt to chart the shared history between archaeology and documentary filmmaking2 I find a roughly chronological approach to be a useful place to start. A chronological approach is arguably also helpful in taking into account documentary filmmakers’ perspectives on the genre. As Barnouw has

2 As opposed to the previously published short histories of archaeology and the media (see Kulik 2007), or archaeology on film (see Morgan 2012).

98 Chapter 4 observed, documentarists position their work as being part of a lineage through which they make sense of the genre (for example, Grierson considered the Lumières’ films and other actualités to be ‘documentaries’ (1937/1979: 70); and Jean Rouch derived the name cinéma vérité from kino-pravda, in direct homage to Dziga Vertov who he considered a forebear to vérité) (1993: 254). Likewise, as we have already seen archaeologists too have perceived themselves in relation to a lineage of documentary productions as they see them (e.g. factual TV) which they seek to respond to, improve or capitalize upon (see section 2.5). As such, this chapter and the next are divided into six parts that explore different phases of archaeology’s relationship with documentary filmmaking as it developed over time.

The first section begins with the birth of cinema and the first actualités featuring archaeology, specifically the Lumière film Les Pyramides (Vue Général) (Promio, 1897), the Edison Company film Excavating Scene at the Pyramids of Sakkarah (1903), and a 1901 panorama of Stonehenge by the Warwick Trading Company. These actualités were among the first (if not the first) non-fiction film recordings presenting indexical documentation of archaeological subject matter to global audiences, and were crucial in cultivating audience demand for cinematic treatments of archaeology on public screens – an essential condition for later archaeology documentaries to be accepted as creatively and economically legitimate prospects.

The second section considers the role of newsreels, experiments of scientific and fieldwork recording, lecture films, and amateur filmmaking, particularly during the 1920s: the period immediately prior to the emergence of the documentary genre. Films discussed include the first newsreel that reported on Carter’s clearance of artefacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb (1923), the film experiments of Harry Burton on the same excavation (c.1923), and the films made by Alexander Keiller of his excavations at Windmill Hill (1925). Although very different non- fiction films, it was attempts such as these – to scientifically and journalistically use film as an indexical document of reality, combined with narrative intent – which helped cultivate a space for the later emergence of the first archaeology documentary. Equally important, during this period it also becomes apparent that archaeologists were themselves working as filmmakers and therefore very much at the forefront of the convergence between non-fiction filmmaking and archaeology.

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The third part of this chapter focuses on L’Île de Pâques (1935). This film explores Rapa Nui (Easter Island) culture and archaeology, and was directed by acclaimed Belgian documentarist Henri Storck in collaboration with archaeologist Henri Lavachery. This film is the first non-fiction film about archaeology that meets all four of Nichols’ criteria for documentary status – including indexical documentation, avant-garde poeticism, rhetorical address, and narrative structuring – making it the earliest known archaeology documentary to date.

4.2 1890s–1910s: Archaeological actualitès

Between the 1890s and 1910s filmmaking rapidly evolved from a handful of bespoke technological novelties for elite private audiences, to become a widely accessible form of public entertainment, with its own cinematic language, international commercial marketplace, legislation, and a growing community of practitioners, sponsors, distributors, and audiences. The primary film form of the day, actualitès, embedded indexical documentation of reality (the first of Nichols’ criteria for documentary status) into cinema. And as archaeology was transitioning from antiquarianism to a scientific profession, early filmmakers increasingly took it as a subject for the new actualité format, propelling archaeology into the limelight and entrenching widespread public interest and support for non-fiction treatments of archaeology on screen.

4.2.1 The Lumières and Les Pyramides

Archaeology’s history on film begins in March 1897, with a single shot of a singularly famous sight – and site (see Still 4.1). Instantly recognizable in the mid- ground is the Sphinx of Giza, in three-quarter profile, gazing impassively beyond the edge of the frame. In the distance behind is the Great Pyramid of Giza, silhouetted by a brilliant white sky.

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Still 4.1: Les Pyramides (Vue Général): the opening scene shows the Sphinx of Giza. [Source: Lumière/YouTube, 1897 (PDM)].

Immediately in the foreground to our right intrudes the slanting corner of another structure, dark and unknown – perhaps part of the Temple of Khafre. But before we can take a second look, this elegant composition is suddenly interrupted by movement: a man rides a camel immediately across our view – from left to right – he looks almost close enough to touch (Still 4.2). He is followed by more men riding camels, leading camels, and walking behind at the end of the procession.

Still 4.2: Les Pyramides (Vue Général): the scene transforms when people begin to move across the frame. [Source: Lumière/YouTube, 1897 (PDM)].

10 camels and 17 men, 4 of them riding, 2 of them in bowler hats – perhaps they are European tourists? But all the men’s faces are featureless black shapes, overexposed by the fierce daylight – we cannot see who they are. Within 50 seconds the film is over. The film is an actualité titled Les Pyramides (Vue Générale), filmed by Alexandre Promio sometime between 12th March and 18th April 1897 (Catalogued in Lumière archives 117 - 381). In the same period Promio also filmed a scene of Egyptian men climbing down from one of the pyramids

101 Chapter 4 titled Descente de la grande pyramide (1897), although perhaps because the second actualité requires explanation, it appears to have had less of an impact (Still 4.3). Together they are the earliest examples I have identified of non-fiction films explicitly depicting archaeological subject matter.

Still 4.3: Descente de la grande pyramide: men climbing down the steps of the pyramid. [Source: Lumière/YouTube 1897 (PDM)].

Promio’s capturing of the famous archaeological site was part of a filmmaking campaign by the Lumière company to flood and dominate the rapidly growing early film industry. Thus, from cinema’s very beginning, Promio and the Lumière’s created and established an international demand for non-fictional films depicting archaeology on public screens. Let us now turn to how this situation came about.

Still 4.4: The dual projector and camera, Cinématographe Lumière, as displayed at the Institut Lumière, Lyon. [Source: Wikimedia Commons (Victorgrigos, 2014, CC BY-SA-4.0)].

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The success of the Lumière’s hegemony was partly due to the clever design of the Cinématographe Lumière camera, but also attributable to the Lumières’ jealous guarding of their invention from competitors – for instance, until 1897 only Lumière opératuers were allowed to use the cameras (Barnouw 1993: 11). The Cinématographe Lumière was but one of many early filmmaking apparatuses invented, patented, launched, redesigned, and publicly demonstrated during this period in a race to perfect and capitalise on the new medium.3 But while not the first film camera invented, the Cinématographe had several crucial advantages over its competitors. Its portable weight of only 5-kg, combined with the ease and flexibility of its operation by hand cranking, enabled individual cameramen to transport it easily, allowing them to capture film at different speeds for differing playback effects, and most importantly: to film on location. Crucially, the Cinématographe could also be adjusted to double as a printer and projector as well, effectively making single operators like Promio one-man production houses, in some instances able to play back films of subjects within hours of their being captured (Still 4.4 shows the Cinématographe displayed in projection mode; Barnouw 1993: 6, 7). Magic lanterns and stereoscope operators could also capture such exotic scenes, but their record was a static one. Thus, while other early filmmakers were confined to staging performances in indoor studios or controllable and easily accessible outdoor locations (such as would have been necessitated by Edison’s 1889 bulky and electrically dependent Kinetoscope), Lumière cameramen were the first to capture and trade foreign views or ‘travelogues’ by filming anywhere their legs could take them. This, of course, included the remote, uneven terrain of exotic and far-flung archaeological sites such as the Pyramids of Giza.

Creators of early films also established another significant link with the ancient past. The Cinématographe had originally been designed in 1892 by Léon Bouly (originally dubbed the Cynématographe Léon Bouly). Bouly had sold the patent for the camera to the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1894, who re- engineered it and were the first to publicly project their films to an audience of

33 at an industry meeting, on 28th December 1895 in the Grand Cafe in Paris – a

3 Others include Pierre Jules César, Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne Jule May; Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope launched in the US in 1893; the British Birt-Acres camera by Robert Paul and Birt Acres in 1895; and others. For more on the early development of the camera see Ceram 1965; Mannoni 2000; Barnaouw 1993; and Popple and Kember 2004.

103 Chapter 4 moment that since become known as the birth of public cinema (Popple and Kember 2004: 7). In a neat twist, Bouly’s term Cynématographe (later shortened by him to Cinématographe) inaugurated the modern term we still use for public films – ‘cinema’ – and follows a nineteenth-century trend of naming optical devices by borrowing from the language of classical antiquity (Michelakis and Wyke 2013: 9). This contriving of a classical origin for early filmmaking – compounded by decisions to then create films of archaeological sites – has been interpreted by film scholars as an explicit attempt to establish cultural legitimacy for the new film medium by adding it to the canon of the high arts (for more see Michelakis and Wyke 2013). It is doubly significant then, particularly for our purposes, that it was through a Cinématographe that archaeology was first captured on film – an apparatus not aligned with science, but with the classics, and the arts.

In 1896 the Lumière company began sending scores of exhibitors and cameramen like Promio around the world, to film life “sur le vif” (“on the run”) by recording, trading and screening hundreds of films featuring famous sites, royal and official events, street scenes, dance and fiction performances, and daily life from around the globe (Barnouw 1993: 11; Popple and Kember 2004: 8). Thus, amid such imagery, the captured footage of Les Pyramides and Descente de la grande pyramide would be circulated to a worldwide audience.4

4.2.2 The Edison Company and Sakkarah

The Lumières’ competitors quickly caught up with them and more archaeologically themed actualités followed. These quickly shifted from presenting archaeological sites as exotic but unchanging sights, to filming archaeological excavations in progress. The earliest film of an archaeological excavation I have identified is ‘Excavating Scene at the Pyramids of Sakkarah’, filmed on 17th June 1903 by A.C. Abadi, a cameraman for the US based Edison Manufacturing Company – the leading US film production company at the time. Sadly, the film itself appears to have either been lost or perished, leaving only a trail of text references behind (e.g. Lant 1992: 101; Musser 1991: 240). A 1967 description from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection describes the film to be in poor condition, with the following synopsis:

4 Fittingly then, the earliest screenings included Egypt, where cinematic shows began on 28 November 1896 in Alexandria at the Stock Market of Toussoun-Pasha; and 28 November 1896 at Hammam Schneider in Cairo (Allan 2008: 160).

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“The film was photographed from a single camera position. In the background approximately fifty natives are carrying baskets of sand and dumping them into a pile. A pyramid can be seen in back of the labourers.” (Niver 1967: 287).

Abadi’s film serves as a sober reminder of the gaps and omissions in film archives and by extension in the filmic archaeological record. That ‘Excavating Scene at the Pyramids of Sakkarah’ is an Edison Manufacturing Company film might also be a factor in this loss: In fierce competition with the Lumières and other early film companies, Edison attempted to combine unconventional engineering and patent laws to control the development of early camera technologies. He designed the sprocket holes of Edison Company film prints to be differently shaped to other film stocks (the Lumières’ were circular, where Edison’s were square), deliberately making Edison film prints incompatible for use on rival companies’ projectors and thus effectively engineering copyright restrictions into the camera technology itself. The consequence of these commercially driven innovations was the beginning of the end of the open market for the film trade, a particularly marked division between European and US film markets, and the seeds of national blocs (Popple and Kember 2004; Dixon 2013). Lack of circulation also led to less opportunity for films to be collected and preserved by enthusiasts – whose caches are a key source of the earliest film collections for today’s archives (Dixon 2013: 29). Thus, although there is no doubt more films were made that featured archaeological sites and excavations during these earliest days of filmmaking, the majority are likely lost to us.

4.2.3 The Warwick Trading Company and the Stonehenge Panorama

The earliest British archaeological actualité I have identified which was produced in the United Kingdom is a 1901 panorama of Stonehenge by an unknown cameraman working for the Warwick Trading Company.5 The Stonehenge panorama is a 48-second film composed of two shots. In the first shot, filmed facing an east-north-eastern direction (the prehistoric avenue would have been behind the henge), the camera slowly pans across the monument from left to right over the course of 31 seconds. The tripod is set close to the standing stones so that they crowd the frame from top to bottom, obscuring the surrounding landscape. Halfway through the pan a uniformed policeman is revealed, dwarfed

5 Released digitally online by BFI in 2015.

105 Chapter 4 by the “leaning stone” behind him, giving a powerful sense of the scale of the monument, before he disappears as the pan continues, ending abruptly on the far right (on stones 16 and 11) (see Still 4.5).

Still 4.5: Stonehenge – Panorama of the Ancient Druidical Remains: the first pan, towards the right, features a policeman [Source: BFI, 1901 (PDM)].

The second shot which takes up the remaining 17 seconds of the film, begins by suddenly and disorientingly panning back in the opposite direction, now from a new vantage point facing north-north-east. This time the policeman stands in front of a trilithon (stones 53, 54, 154), and is joined by a woman (standing in front of stone 16). It is she who gives us the only movement in the film other than the camera’s panning: in the final second of the film she sharply turns her head left towards the policeman, as if responding to something she has heard (Still 4.6).

Still 4.6: Stonehenge - Panorama: the second pan, towards the left, features a woman. [Source: BFI, 1901 (PDM)].

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This film is significant not merely in its role of showing Stonehenge as a spectacle, as Promio did of the Sphinx, but in its probable intent to document and report on the condition of Stonehenge as an archaeological site in need of urgent preservation. At the time of filming Stonehenge was effectively run as a tourist attraction by its owners the Antrobus family. It had officially gained heritage recognition when it was included on the first Schedule of English Monuments as part of the 1882 Ancient Monuments Act, and had increasingly come under public scrutiny for a perceived lack of safety to both visitors and the site (Richards 2017: 94; 2014: 22). This became a particularly contentious issue after William Petrie’s damning report about the state of the monument in 1893, particularly regarding the risk of falling stones (Richards 2014: 23; 2017: 94). After the death of Sir Edmund Antrobus 3rd in 1899, and a partial collapse of the stones in 1900, Sir Edmund Antrobus 4th fenced off the area and began to charge an admission fee to visitors assumedly towards funding the upkeep of the site. Additionally, after decades of Antrobus senior declining archaeologists’ permission to excavate or repair the monument, Antrobus 4th yielded and gave permission to William Gowland to excavate the part of the monument and restore the “leaning stone” (56) to a vertical position. Stonehenge historian Julian Richards therefore characterises the turn of the century as “a turning point in the history of Stonehenge, marking the change from decay to repair…” (2004: 17).

Still 4.7: Stonehenge – Panorama: showing stones 21 (standing, left), and 22 (fallen, centre). [Source: BFI, 1901 (PDM)].

The Warwick Trading Company panorama holds clues to this important turning point in Stonehenge’s history. Close inspection of the film shows that sarsen standing stone 21 is standing alone, a state caused by the 1900 collapse of stone 22 during a storm on 31st December, taking lintel 122 and the trilithon structure

107 Chapter 4 with it (see Still 4.7). In this way, we know the film was made after this collapse had occurred. The film also shows stone 56 standing at a precarious 60˚ angle (Stills 4.5, 4.6, 4.7), so we know the film was made before Gowland’s excavation and re-erection of 56, which occurred sometime between the 18th until 25th September 1901 (Gowland’s work ran August-September 1901, 1902: 44). Additionally, a barbed wire fence was erected around Stonehenge in May 1901, with a turnstile entrance and refreshments stall (Richards 2004: 28). But there is no evidence of the fence in the film either, despite later photos indicating that its proximity to Stonehenge means it would likely have been in frame.6 Therefore, despite the fact the exact date of the filming is unknown today, the Warwick Trading Company panorama can be approximately dated to this 5-month period, between January and May 1901, and the film appears to have captured Stonehenge in the middle of this momentous transformation.

4.2.4 Archaeology actualitès and modern audiences

The success of actualités in establishing a public audience demand for cinematic treatments of archaeology on screen should not only be credited to the production companies, but was equally the work of those who disseminated the films. Travelling showmen would buy or rent one to 2-minute-long reels from production companies and run their own screenings, re-playing popular film sets for months, even years (see Popple and Kember 2004; Christie 2013: 114). Although actualitès were exhibited initially as part of magic shows, vaudeville acts, and music revues, they quickly became the main event and were accompanied by spoken lectures, live music, and live sound effects with each performance adapted to suit each new audience. For example, magic lanternist William Slade toured Britain in 1897 projecting films to a broad range of small audiences in both urban and rural town halls, church halls, music halls, lecture theatres, fair grounds, and even Royal Navy ships; whilst Sri Abdulally Esoofally toured throughout South East Asia with a pop-up tent which had an audience capacity of up to 1000 cinemagoers (see Still 4.8 for an example of a travelling tent-based cinema) (Popple and Kember 2004: 9, 82; Barnouw 1993: 21).

6 There are also no wooden props visible in the film either – although there are 12 props evident in other 1901 photos. Identifying when/where these were erected would assist in further refining the film’s date.

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Still 4.8: Photograph of Thomas Tally's travelling Electric Theatre, Los Angeles, 1902 [Source: Russell 2006 (Reproduced with permission of the Canadian Film Institute)].

The exceptional geographic reach of early cinema combined with increases in working people’s leisure time (chiefly due to nineteenth-century advances in transport), meant that right from the outset - and unlike other sectors of the arts - early cinema audiences crossed boundaries of race, gender, age, and social class (Popple and Kember 2004: 5). While photographs were still mostly consumed on an elite and individual level, and while literacy remained low on a global level, cinema rushed to fill the gap as a means of communicating news and popular entertainment to international audiences (Popple and Kember 2004: 56). Speedy and on-location coverage of the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and Queen Victoria’s funeral - screened within a day of the event itself - quickly pushed actualités to the forefront of popular global demand (Popple and Kember 2004: 14).

Fin de siècle audience reception of film is regarded by film scholars to have been a sophisticated mediation between the audiences, filmmakers, cinematic technologies, and the language of cinema. Film theorist Tom Gunning designates this era of early film as the “cinema of attractions” (or “of instants,” as opposed to featuring developing situations or narratives), during which knowing audiences took delight in the moving image’s illusionist qualities - reflecting, rejecting, or negotiating with what they experienced – not naïvely accepting films as

109 Chapter 4 unproblematic representations of reality, as commonly assumed (Gunning 1989; see also Michelakis and Wyke 2013: 9). Gunning frames early audiences’ cinematic experience as “an encounter with modernity” - encompassing twentieth- century technologies, industries, globalisation, and a new visual language (Gunning 1989: 832). As one contemporary viewer described the new medium of film:

“It will abolish the past, or rather, the past will speak through it to the present, and a thousand years will be unto this marvellous device of man’s brains as a single day.” (1897, quoted in Michelakis and Wyke 2013: 10).7

Within this discourse modern audiences also negotiated a new relationship with archaeological subject matter. For example, in Les Pyramides (Vue Générale), Allan identifies the audience’s mediation with modernity via the surprise and immediacy of the living, moving camel procession which would have challenged previous understandings of the Sphinx and Pyramids as frozen in image and in time, consequentially making the film an act of ‘anti-monumentalisation’ (2008: 168; see also Lant 2013). This same ‘anti-monumentalisation’ mediation can also arguably be observed in the Stonehenge panorama. By including a living, moving, modern day policeman and woman, the film firmly situates Stonehenge as belonging to the then present. Additionally, by capturing the monument during a time of both material change (the reconstruction) and conceptual change (via Gowland’s 1901 assertion that the monument dated to the late neolithic/early bronze age), this film serves not only as an act of anti-monumentalisation but also a challenge to preconceptions of other archaeological sites as timeless. Additionally, the fact that it is ordinary, local, working people who are featured in all three films - men and women audience members might know or see on the street, or imagine themselves to be – recasts these monuments as being situated in daily, modern, working-class life – accessible, relatable, and knowable.

7 Full citation: Unattributed, ‘Where the past speaks,’ New York Mail and Express, 25th September 1897, quoted in Michelakis and Wyke 2013: 10.

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Still 4.9: Photograph of audience at The Palladium Cinema, London, circa 1913 [Source: McKernan 2007 (Reproduced with permission of The Cinema Museum London  2019)].

By the end of the first decade of cinema an international industry had taken root and archaeology actualités were a growing part of it. Filmmakers began to experiment with new methods of x-ray filming, electrical cinematography, editing, special effects, film processing, synch sound, colour effects, and 3D filmmaking. In 1902 The Electric Cinema, the first purpose-built cinema in the world, was constructed in LA; and by 1907 Britain had its own cinemas: The Daily Bioscope in London and The Central Hall in Colne. The same year Britain’s first film trade journal Kinematograph was established, followed by the country’s first film trade fair the next year. Britain’s first Cinematographic Film Act was legislated in 1909, as an attempt to allow local councils to regulate the booming sector and more specifically, to protect exhibitors and audiences from the deadly theatre fires that occurred during the screenings of the highly combustible nitrate-based film-stock (Still 4.9 gives a sense of the capacity of the purpose-built cinema spaces in need of regulation by 1913) (see Popple and Kember 2004: 47). The outcome of this was the beginning of the end of the travelling exhibitors, who were consequently banned from exhibiting at fair grounds and small non-theatrical venues.

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4.2.5 Setting the scene for archaeology documentaries

The above films demonstrate that within two years of cinema’s arrival, archaeology sites had successfully been adopted as actualité content, and within eight years so too had the practice of archaeological excavation. These films functioned as part a modernist dialogue between filmmakers, distributors, and public audiences, allowing a new public forum for audiences to negotiate their relationship with the past. But how do actualités such as Les Pyramides, Descente de la grande pyramide, the Stonehenge panorama, and Excavating Scene at the Pyramids of Sakkarah, fit within the documentary canon?

Characterising the relationship between actualités and the documentary genre is a point of debate in film scholarship as such boundary setting necessarily informs the larger and more contentious debate of defining documentary. Certainly, early exhibitors would later (perhaps anachronistically) refer to their films as ‘documentaries’ (Aufderheide 2007: 3). For example, showman Shri Abdulally Esoofally recalled:

“When I started my bioscope shows in Singapore in 1901, little documentary films I got from London helped me a lot in attracting people.” (1956, quoted in Barnouw 1993: 2).

Likewise, by the 1930s John Grierson regarded the first Lumière films to be documentaries (1937/1979: 70). The current consensus in today’s documentary scholarship is to either locate documentary’s beginnings in the 1920s with Soviet avant-garde filmmaking (Aufderheide 2007; Nichols 2017: 89; Nichols 2016: 13), or in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the Griersonian documentary movement (Rotha 1973; Winston 1995) (both discussed below, see sections 4.4.1-2). In contrast to this, contemporaneous trade journals (e.g. The British Journal of Photography and The Optical Magic Lantern and Photographic Enlarger) and early film histories position the origins of filmmaking and documentary in a linear, technologically determined narrative rooted in the mid-nineteenth-century development of photography, often cast as a ‘pre-history’ of cinema (Ceram 1965; Mannoni 2000; Carroll 2003).

For the purposes of this thesis I have approached the history of archaeological documentary filmmaking in line with those who suggest that the seeds of the documentary genre lie with these experiments of recording actualitès by Edison, the Lumières, and other early film pioneers (Barsam 1973; Thompson and Bordwell 1994; Ellis and McLane 2005: 6). That is not to say I advocate what

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Nichols dubs an “untroubled passage from photographic realism to documentary representation” (2016: 234). I agree that actualité films are clearly not documentaries in the way we recognise the genre today: without the technology for sophisticated editing or screening they lacked narrative storytelling and poetic experimentation, two of Nichols’ essential criteria. That said, these films undeniably fulfilled the criterion of indexical documentation in every respect: as cinematic spectacle, as journalism, and even in retrospect as historical and archaeological evidence. They also possibly had elements of rhetorical address through the live lectures and explanations of showmen like Slade and Esoofally. Most important however, is the fact that these actualités created an expectation among public audiences that they would be able to see films depicting real archaeological sites and excavations from around the world on their local cinema screens. The ongoing success of such films confirmed to production companies and distributors that non-fiction films featuring real archaeology were both popular and commercially viable - essential conditions for later film treatments of archaeology to be green-lit. I therefore contend that actualités of archaeology - including Les Pyramids, Excavating scene at the Pyramid of Sakkarah, and the Stonehenge panorama - were foundational for archaeology later becoming a stable and viable subject for the documentary genre.

4.3 1910s–1920s: Non-fiction filmmaking thrives

During the first decades of the twentieth century a new international non-fiction film industry was expanding and carving out a niche for itself, independent of the fictional film sector and the rapidly growing Hollywood. At the same time film manufacturers found ways to create longer reels of celluloid stock and better- quality cinematic projection, and with these technologies attempted to segment the film industry into professional, amateur, public, private, and even military markets. But as film technologies, filmmaker communities, and audiences all grew and diversified, so too did new non-fiction formats flourish in the forms of newsreels, amateur home movies, and lecture films, each field competing with the others as alternative ways to indexically document reality on screen. These non-fiction formats gradually grew to oppose each other in purpose, content, and reception, eventually creating a space for the nascent documentary genre to take shape. The development of treatments of archaeology on screen can also be observed across this transition from non-fiction towards documentary. By comparing the newsreel coverage of Howard Carter’s excavation of

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Tutankhamun’s tomb, with the scientific and amateur filmmaking experiments by archaeologists Harry Burton and Alexander Keiller, we can begin to understand and position early archaeological filmmaking within its broader non-fiction context, and recognise those films as foundational precursors to the emergence of archaeology documentaries.

4.3.1 The rise of newsreels

After archaeology’s popularity in the actualité format, it is unsurprising that in the first quarter of the twentieth century archaeology would become a popular subject of newsreels, which found their audiences via the now well-established cinema economy. Britain’s early film industry and film movements had stalled during the First World War but had bounced back with vigour by the early 1920s. By this time there were roughly 4000 cinemas in Britain ranging from 100 seat town halls to 3000 seat luxury cinemas decorated in a “neo-Grecian” style in the cities, complete with cafes, cloakrooms, and orchestra pits – and London alone had over 600 (Low 1950: 16-17; McKernan 1992; Popple and Kember 2004: 83). Cinemas typically exhibited a range of one to two-hour programs, comprising 5- minute newsreel compilations followed by feature-length fictional films, with the whole programme changing twice weekly. Intriguingly, newsreel companies of the day unsuccessfully lobbied against cinema exhibitors for longer 10-minute slots as an attempt to allow more comprehensive news stories – an early indication of the growing power that distributors had over the nature of the content created (Norman 1971). The newsreel compilations featured ‘topical’ and ‘news’ items such as horse races, sporting competitions, political and royal appearances, dance performances, and travelogues. These “silent” screenings were accompanied by live narration, live sound effects, synchronized audio disc recordings, and/or live music in the form of solo musicians, quartets, or orchestras (Popple and Kember 2004: 83). Film historian Rachel Low estimates that by the 1920s British cinemas were attracting audiences of up to twenty million individuals per week (based on the 1917 Cinema Commission, Low 1950: 23).

The production of newsreels was a tough, fast-paced business, in which newsreel companies competed for the best coverage of news events, paying gatekeepers large sums for exclusive rights, prime camera positions, and the prestige of association (McKernan 1996: 68). The competition was so fierce that companies would even adopt dangerous and violent tactics to ensure the best quality and

114 Chapter 4 quickest coverage of events - in once instance one company hired thugs to throw razor blade studded potatoes at another’s camera crew; another hired motorcycle racers to deliver film-cans to the studio “with a bounty of £ 1 for every minute they could cut off half-an-hour by flying round Trafalgar Square on the pavement” (McKernan 1996: 68; Norman 1971: 2). This competing for the best and quickest coverage of news events was equally the case for newsreels featuring archaeology, a notable example being the coverage of Howard Carter’s excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

4.3.2 Howard Carter and Tutankhamun in the media

Howard Carter officially opened Tutankhamun’s tomb on 29th November 1922, spurring the first printed press reports to be issued the following day (Carter 1922-1923). Unlike other Egyptian tombs (and excepting for a theft in 1319 BC), Tutankhamun’s tomb had been largely protected from looting - making it the most complete collection of ancient Egyptian grave goods. Although scholastic knowledge of ancient Egypt was already comprehensive before the excavation, the appeal of Carter’s project was as much rooted in the story of these “wonderful things” - the promise of glittering treasures – rather than the subtle shifts in historical knowledge provided by their study. Over the ensuing seasons, the spectacle of the archaeologist’s removal of a massive quantity of 5298 superbly preserved objects from the tomb was a visual sensation, particularly for the crowds of foreign dignitaries, journalists, photographers, and tourists who visited the excavation precisely to witness this event, and to capture for themselves evidence of it:

“Each object as it was removed was placed upon a padded wooden stretcher and securely fastened to it with bandages. […] From time to time, when a sufficient number of stretchers had been filled - about once a day, on an average - a convoy was made up and dispatched under guard to the laboratory. This was the moment for which the crowd of watchers above the tomb were waiting. Out came the reporters’ note-books, click, click, click went the cameras in every direction, and a lane had to be cleared for the procession to pass through. I suppose more films were wasted in the valley last winter than in any other corresponding period of time since cameras were first invented.” (Carter 27/12/1923, in 1972: 57)

Carter’s reflections on the media coverage give a sense of the stressful and unexpected pressures caused by the presence of the media and public visitors at

115 Chapter 4 the site. Although his remarks appear to describe photographers rather than newsreel filmmakers, it is important to keep in mind that the two would have occupied the same space, looked similar in terms of equipment, and likely had a similar psychological impact on the archaeological team. As Carter put it:

“Archaeology under the limelight is a new and rather bewildering experience for most of us. In the past we have gone about our business happily enough, intensely interested in it ourselves, but not expecting other folk to be more than tepidly polite about it, and now all of a sudden we find the world takes an interest in us, an interest so intense and so avid for details that special correspondents at large salaries have to be sent to interview us, report our every movement, and hide round corners to surprise a secret out of us. […] it is quite certain that, once the initial Times dispatch had been published, no power on earth could shelter us from the light of publicity that beat down upon us. We were helpless, and we had to make the best of it.” (Carter 1972: 63)

By 9th January 1923 the attentions of the media had proved such a time- consuming hindrance to the progress of Carter’s excavation that Carnarvon signed a contract granting exclusive press coverage of the discovery to The Times London-based newspaper in exchange for project funding - an agreement Carter described was received with relief and ‘delight’ by the archaeology team (1972: 64). Unfortunately, the deal unintentionally sparked a diplomatic rift between the English archaeologists and the Egyptian government and press, who took the foreign media monopoly as a national affront. According to historian Reeves the conflict triggered a ‘guerrilla war’ of ‘media mischief’ from The Times competitors (1990: 64). Among these competitors were the newsreel companies - which deliberately took their names and cue from newspaper titles (Budget, Gazette, etc.), and were in the industry referred to as “animated newspapers” (1990: 64; McKernan 1996: 72). Pathé’s Animated Gazette had covered Carter’s excavation since 1922, and Gaumont Graphic was another prime competitor. But it was the British company Daily Sketch Topical Budget, the third most successful newsreel company in Britain, which boldly claimed to be the first to present footage of the tomb clearance.

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4.3.3 First Peeps of the opening of TUT-ANKH AMEN’S TOMB

First Peeps of the opening of TUT-ANKH AMEN’S TOMB

No need to re-tell the story of the finding of the tomb of the Great Pharaoh whose death sleep has been disturbed by Civilization - after 3,000 years.

The story is on the lips of all men. No discovery of our time has so moved the whole World.

No need to recount the extraordinary difficulties which have attended the taking of Cinematograph pictures of the Tomb. They are also well known.

The pictures therefore do not pretend to be other than they are. They are not of the high quality ordinarily associated with TOPICAL BUDGET. But if they are crude - they are vital.

So vital that despite their imperfections we believe they will have an irresistible appeal as the first to be shown in public.

Still 4.10: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: Howard Carter can be seen in the centre with the cane, walking away, with a tomb in the background [Source: BFI/YouTube, 1923].

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After this lengthy introduction we are finally introduced to the Valley of the Kings, with the viewer positioned in the centre of the excavation site. But Carter is merely a distant figure, his back to us, disappearing out of view beyond a tent (Still 4.10). He exhibits no interest in or even awareness of the filming. As such we, the audience, by seeing through the eyes of the newsreel cameraman are perhaps not only exploring but intruding as well.

Pans of the site follow, showing the entrance to the tombs. Then:

The Tomb of Tut-Ankh Amen.

The Cameraman was compelled to work quickly because of watching eyes.

We are suddenly presented with two speedy tilting shots that dip down into the entry of the tomb which we can see was blocked off with a modern door - we cannot see inside (Still 4.11). A quick pan takes us up and to the right from the tomb entrance to view the stacks of wooden stretchers queued up, ready to be laden with objects.

Still 4.11: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: a hastily and illicitly captured shot of an entrance to a tomb [Source: BFI/YouTube, 1923].

When money failed, newsreel companies would resort to “pirating” by recording illicit footage using tiny Debri Sept cameras (McKernan 1992: 96; 1996: 68). It

118 Chapter 4 seems likely that this unauthorized filming is what we witnessed in “First Peeps”, during the pans and tilts of the tomb entrance, and as alluded to in the intertitle commentary. This illicitly captured, tomb-raider-like visual narrative continues throughout the rest of the newsreel, before taking on another dimension when the artefacts - or “treasures” - are introduced.

The Tomb gives up its Treasure. Bringing out an ebony chair inlaid with ivory and gold.

Still 4.12: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: part of a sequence featuring the ebony chair being carried out of the tomb [Source: BFI/YouTube, 1923].

We are treated with a sequence showcasing the objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb: Carter and a retinue of Egyptian guards escort two labourers carrying a small ebony chair bound to a stretcher (Still 4.12). Notably, despite the apparent restrictions on media coverage at the time, Carter’s procession appears to pass by the camera several times, even pausing in one shot, allowing the cameraman a close-up of the chair. The shifting direction of shadows suggests also the cameraman took the time to change locations to get more close-ups. This coverage suggests that Carter and the guards turned a blind eye to the presence of Topical Budget newsreel man for at least some shots - perhaps not considering him to be a credible competitor to the print-based Times and therefore not a risk to the press exclusivity agreement. Such an attitude would be in keeping with the position of newsreels at the time, which - despite the speed of processing and

119 Chapter 4 distribution to cinemas - were still always on the heels of the quicker, further reaching print media.

As for most newsreels, the authorship of First Peeps is difficult to ascertain. 1922-1923 were Topical Budget’s best production years with a staff of between 30-40, including 6 regular cameramen supported by a pool of freelancers (all men), and a laboratory based editorial team of joiners, cutters, repairers (mostly women), and graders based at Wardour Street in London (McKernan 1992). The illustrations in the newsreel featuring Egyptian motifs were likely made by Alf Skitterell, considered by industry insiders of the day to be “by common consent the best optical printer the film industry every produced” (Norman 1971: 6). But beyond these broad facts, there is no record of the names of the those who filmed at the excavation, processed, or edited the “First Peeps” newsreel, and the authorship remains unknown. Being a format where speed trumped finesse, newsreels were relatively lacking in the kind of cinematography and editing techniques that allowed a personal touch, let alone directorial vision (see McKernan 1996).

Nonetheless, there are small details in First Peeps which provide clues to the newsreel’s production as well as providing valuable indexical documentation relevant to archaeology. For example, by viewing the film digitally today we can inspect objects such as the ebony chair frame by frame. Despite the noisy and low resolution of the film, and despite the back splat of the chair being obscured by a cloth, we can clearly discern the chair’s distinctive clawed feet, its delicate spindles, and its curved arms (Still 4.13). As carried on the stretcher by two adult men we can judge its size to be unusually small. Comparison of the film footage with artefact photographs and Carter’s field sketches enable identification of the artefact as Chair #39: Tutankhamun’s boyhood chair. 71-cm high, made of African ebony, with ivory inlay, golden panelling, bronze pins capped in gold, all preserved in remarkably excellent condition (see Still 4.14, Griffith Institute 2004; also Reeves 1990: 185).

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Still 4.13: Tut-ankh Amen's Tomb Daily Sketch Topical Budget: the ebony chair passing again, this time close to camera [Source: BFI/YouTube, 1923].

Still 4.14: Tutankhamun’s childhood chair [Source: Burton Photograph P0114A (Reproduced with permission of The Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, © 2019)].

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According to excavation records the chair was removed from the Antechamber, which suggests - when cross checked against Carters diary dates - that the

Topical Budget footage must have been captured between 27th December and 16th February 1923 (Carter 1972: 58; Reeves 1990: 60). According to BFI archival records Topical Budget newsreel was released on the 22nd February of 1923.8 And as mentioned above, the in-film narration referring to the cameraman’s quick filming to avoid “watchful eyes” suggests the footage was captured after the press exclusivity deal was made with The Times on 9th February. This leaves a narrow window of time - between the 9th and 16th of February - for the film to have therefore been shot. Like most newsreel footage, the raw reels would likely have been posted from Egypt via train to the main office on Wardour Street in London to be processed and edited for rapid release to beat the competition to the cinemas. In this case then, the film appears to have taken a speedy 6 and 13 days to go from being captured outside Tutankhamun’s tomb to being transported to the UK, edited, copied, disseminated, and screened in London cinemas - beating competitor Gaumont who did not release their film of the clearance until March 1923. Evidently the title “First Peeps” was well earned.

Topical Budget averaged 175-200 copies per issue, distributing to 700-1000 mostly British cinemas. Despite this limited reach in comparison to its competitors, historian McKernan has estimated the Topical Budget films - likely including “First Peeps” - would have had an audience reach of up to three and a half million individuals per week - a quarter of the entire cinema-going population in Britain at the time (1992: 64). And although, as McKernan reminds us, these viewers had primarily come to see the fictional film that would follow the newsreel, the real events captured and projected by newsreels “widened people’s view of the world and they forced public figures to adapt to the needs of the camera” (1996: 73). This holds true of First Peeps as well: a widening, thoroughly modernist view of the world which included a growing appreciation of archaeology on a global scale, and a fascination with “public figures” - now including archaeologists.

8 22nd Feb 1923 is the date BFI states film was released, presumably as a public showing in the UK. But as Usai notes (1994:65), archivists also use the term ‘release date’ to refer to the date films were made available to exhibitors to acquire – therefore pinning down a precise date and provenance according to archival references is difficult. But for our purposes, let this date suffice.

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Through First Peeps two factors begin to emerge which we will see have come to shape the later relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. In the first instance, we can see the marked tensions between individual archaeologists and media makers such as filmmakers, between whom the exchange of funding for access would rarely prove to be a simple matter - especially when such financially motivated agreements created conflict. In this case, when the filmmakers could not gain official access they resorted to speed and stealth - and got their footage – and got it to audiences. Carter’s response to the ongoing and invasive the public (and political) interest in the excavation continued to be one of intransigence: he even implemented a strike in protest of the public attention, putting the excavation on hiatus for 10 days in February 1924. Historically then, Carter’s dig has since become something of a parable in archaeology - an example of how not to court the media. The second significant factor to note was that the ongoing appeal of real archaeological subject matter on public screens. No matter how quick or poor the camera work, how lacking in detail or ‘accuracy’ the story, or whether it had the approval and involvement of consenting authorities - the attraction of archaeology for public audiences meant that it would always be a promising prospect (and commodity) to filmmakers and distributors alike.

4.3.4 Harry Burton and Tutankhamun

Carter’s excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb was not only captured on film by newsreel-men but by excavation team members as well, chief among them Harry Burton. Burton is best known for his photography of Tutankhamun’s tomb and artefacts, made after he joined in mid-December 1922 at Carter’s request, following Carter’s own lack of success with photography (Carter 1922-3; see also Reeves 1990; Johnson/Hill 1997; Ridley 2013; Riggs 2016). Burton’s status as a seasoned field archaeologist as well as his close friendship with Carter granted him a level of access that could never have been achieved by outsiders like the newsreel men (as an indicator of the depth of their friendship it is worth noting that Carter made Burton the executor to his will, Reeves 1990). Burton produced approximately 12 hours of film footage of Egyptian archaeology projects between 1922 and 1924, supported by Albert Lythgoe as a second cameraman (who was the Head of Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and most likely also aided by Burton’s unnamed “native assistants” as well (Johnson/Hill 1997: 69; 1997: 76; Roehrig and Daniel 2009). However, despite his producing what is a significant output of material for the period, Burton’s

123 Chapter 4 experiments with filmmaking have thus far earned little more than passing mentions or footnotes in publications on Tutankhamun (e.g. Allen 2006: 7; Reeves 1990: 217), and has gone generally unacknowledged in the wider archaeological literature, although recent headway has been made by historian of archaeology Professor Christina Riggs in her study of Burton’s photographic work (2019), which partly draws from the archives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. What follows in this section is mostly a combination of Riggs’ cross-institutional research with my own study of the digitised records of the Griffith Institute, although it should be noted that for various reasons neither Riggs nor I have had access to study Burton’s original films held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time of writing, these have not been officially catalogued by the Museum and so remain a relatively unknown body of work9. Historian George Johnson and the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Marsha Hill have viewed some of the footage and give their interpretations of it (1997), and their work is also included here. But until Burton’s films are studied as a full body of work, little can be said about their content, a regretful situation as Burton appears to be the first archaeologist to conduct his own filmmaking for archaeological purposes – perhaps the first to attempt filmmaking at all.10 However, clues about the team’s motives and uses for the filmmaking can be gleaned through analysis of primary source evidence describing Burton’s work. By considering the conditions and context of Burton’s filmmaking we can situate his work within a canon of archaeology’s relationship with non-fiction filmmaking and by proxy, with documentary.

British born Harry Burton originally began working as a field archaeologist in Egypt in 1902, but his flair for photography (a result of his earlier art history training in Florence) led to his employment from 1914 onwards with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Expedition as a professional archaeological photographer (Reeves 1990; Hill 1997: 60; Ridley 2013: 119-120). In addition to field and photography work Burton began to teach himself filmmaking, and to apply within to his work as an archaeologist. Using film to record Carter’s excavation had not been Burton’s idea, however. The filmmaking

9 Johnson mentions (1997: 75) that Catharine Roehrig of the MMA Egyptian Department screened a segment of the film at the 1992 Seattle meeting of the American Research Centre in Egypt, and that the footage was at the time being preserved and indexed for editing by the MAA Egyptian and Education departments. 10 Carter however, was not the first archaeologist to commission filmmaking of an excavation. The earliest known instance of that is the 1912-13 excavations at Jebel Moya by photographer Arthur George Barrett’s, commissioned by Henry Wellcome, although these were never publicly screened (Saward 2015).

124 Chapter 4 was instigated by Lythgoe who wrote to Burton on 21st June 1920, asking if he had experience using a ‘moving-picture camera’ – he had not (Riggs 2018a; Riggs 2019: 26). Museum trustee Edward Harkness was also keen for filmmaking to take place and so purchased a hand-cranked Akeley camera for Burton to use, bringing it to Egypt in 1921, and to Luxor in 1922 (Hill 1997: 77; Roehrig and Daniel 2009; Riggs 2019: 21, 94). When the Akeley malfunctioned in 1923 Carter purchased another for Burton to use, this time a Sinclair, and as well as two arc lamps specifically for lighting tomb interiors (in addition to the electrical lighting installed for the excavation) (Riggs 2019: 94-5; Roehrig and Daniel 2009). It is noteworthy that both the Akeley and Sinclair were professional 35-mm film cameras – in particular, the Akeley was designed for fieldwork such as nature filming, and was being used by documentarists such as Robert Flaherty (when filming Nanook of the North, 1922). Burton continued his filmmaking at Carter’s project in 1923 and 1924.

The excavation diaries of the archaeological team and their families provide a valuable resource that grants insight into the aims and conditions of Burton’s filmmaking. For example, on 1st June 1922 Carter notes: “Positives of cinema films to from N.Y. to London about June 1st. Others to be printed in London,” (GI/HC 1922), suggesting filming must have occurred in the prior season in 1921-1922, as well as indicating the extremely slow turn around for the footage to be processed. As Riggs notes, the delays in processing meant Burton was only able to finally see his footage in August 1923 when visiting family in Britain – nearly a two-year lag to see if and how his attempts at focusing, framing, and panning had worked (2019: 94).

Filming continued the following season, as mentioned in Carter’s 1923 notes: “Burton made some trials with the kinema camera.” (GI/HC 30/11/1923). Additionally, Burton’s wife Minnie who accompanied him to Luxor, makes multiple references to Harry’s “movie” making and “cinema camera” in Luxor (GI/MB 24/01/1923; 27/03/1923; 6/09/1923).

Significantly, on 12th February 1924, in his excavation diary, fellow archaeologist Arthur Mace also notes Burton’s attempts to film the uncovering of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus:

“In the Sepulchral chamber forces directed disposed as follows –

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Three workmen to east differential, Callender and a fourth workmen at west differential: Burton with his movie camera on the steps leading down, Mace on north side of sarcophagus to make the official notes, Carter directing.

At a given signal the chains were stretched and the lid slightly raised. Then a pause to adjust tackle and secure an exact balance. This done the word was given to raise, and the lid swung steadily upwards. At first sight nothing could be seen within but a mass of cloth. Then looking closer we saw that this was a kind of shroud placed upon the top of a large anthropoid coffin, covering it entirely except for a few inches at the top the west end where the upper part of the head was bare. The raised foot end of the coffin came within about two inches of the top of the sarcophagus, the head some few inches lower. The shroud, except for the small space above mentioned at the head, completely covered the coffin, and hung down at the sides right to the bottom of the sarcophagus. At this point we had to restrain our curiosity while Burton made some photographs…” (GI/AM 1923-1924, my emphasis).

Historian George Johnson and the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Marsha Hill have seen and provide a description of some of Burton’s films: his shots include pans over decorated tomb walls, a few unspecified close-ups in tombs, and an illustrative sequence of Burton demonstrating his photographic methodology. Burton carefully arranges a series of mirrors to light the Tomb of Usheret for photographic recording using Lumière/Autochrome colour plates – a process which the film reveals to us took an unusually long 22-seconds-per- photograph (Hill 1997: 76; for further analysis of this film sequence see Johnson 1997: 69). Assumedly this lighting and photography demonstration was intended to be used as a lecture aid by the team, most likely by Carter on his tours in the off-season. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art curators Roehrig and Daniel, Burton also filmed ethnographic scenes of contemporary Egyptian life for lecture purposes, also at the suggestion of Lythgoe (2009).

Although Burton learned from some of his errors (such as panning too quickly), other experiments were utter failures, such as filming inside the Burial Tomb, where the electric lighting which had allowed superb photography turned out to be insufficient for filmmaking (Johnson and Hill 1997: 69; Riggs 2019: 95).

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Burton’s attempts to capture usable film footage, and Carter’s unhelpfulness, deeply frustrated him:

“I am terribly mortified at this failure although I am not wholly to blame. I kept telling Carter that unless he concentrated the light it was a waste of good material + time. His only reply was that I must do the best I could. By the end of the season I felt completely done up by constantly trying to make Carter see reason.” (Burton to Lythgoe, 30th April 1924, MMA/HB: 1924-29, in Riggs 2019: 95).

Like other filmmakers of the time Burton would have found filmmaking more difficult and limiting than photography. Not only was poor lighting a problem, but the angle of early camera lenses were smaller than photographic cameras, meaning that in order to keep moving subjects in frame their movements either needed to be choreographed or filmed at a greater distance than photography. Timing was an issue too: the required 40-second exposures for filmmaking took longer than photography, and camera movements had to be slow and careful to preserve focus (McKernan 2002:27). Burton’s lack of appropriate processing facilities and inability to view his rushes within a timely manner must have made it nearly impossible for him to improve his technique. Additionally, he does not appear to have edited the film footage himself (Roehrig 2018).

According to some accounts Burton discontinued his filmmaking experiments after 1924, deciding that the demands of filming – particularly the lighting requirements – were impractical for archaeological purposes in Egyptian tombs (Johnson 1997: 69, Hill 1997: 77). However, through her study of Burtons letters archived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Riggs presents a possible alternative reason filming at Carter’s excavation ended. Writing to Lythgoe, Burton states:

“The work with Carter is going very well, so far, + he is quite reasonable. I spoke to him about doing some more “movies” but he said he was sorry he couldn’t consent, as he has promised the Govt there should be no more taken in the tomb, but he would rather I didn’t as he didn’t wish to give anybody cause for complaint. After that I felt it wouldn’t be fair to take the camera over. As a matter of fact there is really nothing worthwhile doing as the boxes as they come out of the tomb are covered over and are therefore nothing like as interesting as the bed etc. that we got the first year.” (MMA/HB: 1924-29, in Riggs 2019: 99 [fn.80]).

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As a representative of the Museum as well a team member of the excavation at times Burton felt he was a servant of ‘two masters,’ and in his diary he noted multiple instances of personal frustrations he had with Carter which made working together a challenge (Riggs 2019: 96). This affected his access to conduct photography and filming – neither were ever a given. For example, to Burton’s expressed frustration Carter also prohibited Burton filming the coffins being removed from the tomb, cryptically claiming a need for secrecy in the matter (Burton to Lythgoe, 27 October 1925 (MMA/HB: 1924-29, in Riggs 2019: 98).

Without access to Burton’s original films we cannot determine if or how his experiments with filmmaking might fulfil Nichols’ criteria for inclusion in the documentary genre, although given his professional brief it seems unlikely that he would have used avant-guard poetics, rhetorical address, or narrative storytelling. However, at least one of Nichols’ criteria was certainly met: that the filmed content would have had a clear indexical relationship to reality. Such indexicality would have also been essential in what appears to have been the first attempt to use film as a scientific recording tool in archaeology. In the least, Burton and his team deserve recognition as potentially the first archaeologists to undertake filmmaking as a valuable and viable medium for recording and communicating archaeology.

4.3.5 Alexander Keiller and Windmill Hill

Burton may have been the first, but he was by no means the only archaeologist in the 1920s to experiment with non-fiction filmmaking. British archaeologist Alexander Keiller also made films about his own archaeological fieldwork in Wiltshire in the UK. Like Burton, Keiller is better known for his excavations and photographic experiments (especially aerial photography – see Keiller and Crawford 1928), but his experiments with filmmaking have gone largely unacknowledged. In the archaeological literature there are only two passing references to Keiller’s filmmaking: his biographer Lynda Murray briefly mentions that early cine film exists that featured Keiller’s car at Windmill Hill (although she does not name Keiller as the filmmaker, 1999: 44) 11; and there is a passing

11 The former is possibly a reference to a 1939 film of the Avebury project made by Conway Films Ltd (filmed July 6th), also mentioned in the diary of Denis Grant King (1939: 28). This film has been partially digitised by the National Trust and is on display in the Keiller Museum at Avebury.

128 Chapter 4 mention by Thornton by that Keiller also filmed at his excavations at Avebury in the 1930s, and that these reels included home movies of ski jumping in Switzerland (2016: 40). But Keiller’s archaeological filmmaking deserves more attention than this.

Beginning in 1925, Keiller made three short films about his 3-week excavation at the Neolithic causewayed enclosure site of Windmill Hill in south-east England. The three 1925 films have been catalogued and archived at the BFI. Two have been digitised for the purposes of this thesis and can subsequently be viewed as MP4s on site at the BFI. The third has yet to be digitised as it is subject to restricted access to preserve the original nitrate film. For the sake of brevity I will discuss in detail only the first of these three films: “Excavations at Neolithic Site of Windmill Hill Near Avebury” (1925) (Please see Appendix E for a full transcription)12.

The film opens with a white-on-black art-deco framed intertitle:

The Neolithic Site

of

Windmill Hill;

Near Avebury,

Wiltshire, England.

Our first image follows standard editorial practice: a wide establishing shot via a jolty pan of the landscape, showing the setting of the film including a landscape of farming fields hedged by a wood, nearby spoil heaps, the distant excavation site with a car parked beside it, and mound-like features. Throughout the scene, we can make out small human figures walking in pairs through the landscape, giving a sense of scale and time.

In the style of opening credits, we are introduced to the “stars” of the excavation via alternating inter-titles with observational or staged portraits of the key archaeological team smiling at each other or at the camera, laughing, gesturing, posing, speaking to persons out of frame, or working. In order, these include “H. St. George Gray,” “Veronica M. Keiller” (Keiller’s second wife, and a fellow

12 Unfortunately due to licensing restrictions BFI was unable to allow for stills to be made from Keiller’s films.

129 Chapter 4 archaeologist), “Alexander Keiller F.S.A (Scot),” “assisted by O.G.S. Crawford F.S.A. (Archaeological Officer, Ordnance Survey)”, and finally, “One more “close-up!” William E. V. Young (“Flint Young”) Foreman of the digging gang.”

Afterwards, another inter-title introduces us to the site:

A plan of the Ancient

Earthworks on

Windmill Hill.

This is followed by a lengthy 40-second shot of the archaeological site plan on paper (unfortunately the labels and details are indistinguishable on the digital copy of the film). The narrative then suddenly takes an unexpected turn:

The daily route to the site of the site of the

excavations would have presented

difficulties to any other mode of

transit that “The Oobit”

(Citroen-Kegresse Caterpillar)

which proved invaluable throughout

the work.

We are treated with an entertaining sequence, narrated by intertitles, of Keiller and the archaeological team slowly riding the Caterpillar through the Windmill Hill landscape, particularly up and down the ancient ditches, “since gradients, however steep, worry her not at all.” Team members are also shown using the vehicle as a windbreak on-site for note-taking.

Then:

When all hands were needed

elsewhere, the Citroen, loaded

up, was dispatched across

Windmill Hill on her own.

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We watch the vehicle crossing the frame – and the archaeological site – with no driver at all:

Difficulty was sometimes

experienced when she reached

her destination in persuading

her that the journey had been

completed.

Keiller suddenly runs into frame, up to the unruly car, gesturing wildly to it to halt before jumping in to take control and stop it. Stunt scene over, the narrative returns to the scientific explanation and analysis of the excavation.

The final third of the film follows more of a typical lecturing format and is dedicated to describing the cuttings, ditches, and causeways of the “inner ditch” and its interpretation. This segment is composed using alternating intertitles and imagery of the archaeological sections and features, some as indicated by Keiller using a stadia rod and gestures; as well as imagery of spoil heaps and of excavation work in progress (the team measuring, photographing, and shovelling).

For example:

Inner Ditch;

Cutting No. 1.

showing a section of the

silted-up ditch

Keiller is shown kneeling and indicating to section features out of the frame:

The stratification shows the silting

from the banks into the ditch at

different periods. The large rubble

at the foot of the ditch is what is

called “rapid silting”. and takes place

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very shortly after construction.

Anything found among the rapid silt

may be considered as practically

contemporary with the construction

of the work.

Keiller is shown gesturing to the camera and indicating to features at the bottom of an archaeological section, unfolding and using a staff to take measurements. Regrettably, the black and white footage, degraded by age and the digitisation process, does not clearly show the stratigraphy Keiller sought to communicate. After more scenes of a similar kind about other archaeological features, the film concludes with a final intertitle:

End of Part 1.

The next film, presumably “Part 2”, follows the lecture format of the first, alternating descriptive intertitles with site imagery and action shots. This time the focus is the excavation of the “middle ditch” (including unearthing of neolithic pottery), and the “outer ditch.” It includes a segment showing Veronica Keiller demonstrating the method of sounding for subsurface pits. Inter-titles list the artefacts found including a polished axe, deer horn picks, chalk balls, hammer stones and flint arrowheads – although none are shown in the film itself. The film ends with visits from various “distinguished visitors.” Presumably the final undigitised film is the third in the sequence.

Like Burton, Keiller’s films were made using 35-mm nitrate stock, suggesting the use of a professional camera. Unlike Burton, Keiller has evidently taken the next step of experimenting with editing techniques, successfully cutting his films into a chapter-like structure complete with scripting, special effects, a credit-like sequence featuring members of the team, and inter-titling that guides the viewer through the sequence. Keiller’s films also differ from Burton’s purist attempts at indexical scientific recording and reporting of archaeological subject matter. Instead, Keiller had a more experimental approach to filmmaking, with the beginnings of a distinctive authorial voice, clear of poetic (surrealist) experimentation, and clear narrative structuring.

Keiller appears regularly throughout the all three films, yet his authorship of the film is not conclusive. In the BFI archival description for the films, Keiller is

132 Chapter 4 credited for either ‘photography’ (1925a, 1925c), or as ‘producer and sponsor’ (1925b), although why these differing credits have been attributed to him is unclear. Regrettably, we cannot know who was behind the camera and who made which shots in Keiller’s films (or even if the camera had a mechanical crank and therefore unmanned for some shots). However, we do know that Keiller is the editor and therefore arguably the creative director of one if not all three films – as also stated in his personal correspondence with the site director Harold St George Gray on 5th May 1925 (typed and accompanied by handwritten notation marked with *:

“My Cinema projector collapsed last night, and therefore I have not been able to run the films through yet, but from what I have seen of them by holding them up to the light they would appear to be quite remarkably fine.* These you will see when you come up to London. It will in any case take some time to “cut and join” them, apart from the hateful job of writing, photographing and inserting appropriate sub-titles.

“*Later. Some very good; others spoiled by light getting in on the t??? - apo.??” (Keiller 1925).

This letter, together with the archived 35-mm original film, indicates that Keiller was not only the star, but also the editor, exhibitor, producer, and most likely director of the three films. Additionally, his expertise in mechanics and engineering would have been invaluable in maintaining the professional grade 35- mm-based filmmaking and exhibition equipment – as a mechanic he would likely have been able to repair the broken cine-projector himself. The letter also demonstrates Keiller’s commitment to not only experiment with film recording as Burton did, but to take the next step by undertaking the difficult, skilful, and time-consuming post-production tasks of editing and self-exhibition.

For example, the Citroën-Kegrasse segment may have been intended for laughs, but it also reveals how Keiller took time to plan and develop some proficiency in stunt driving for the screen, trick photography, and the cinematic grammar of visual storytelling (framing, continuity, pacing, etc.). It is also a clear expression of Keiller’s developing authorial voice: Keiller was an avid car collector and had previously directed the Sizaire-Berwick car manufacturing company, as well as having served as a ‘motor engineer’ in the division of ‘armoured cars’ during WWI (Murray 1999: 18-14). He had bought the Kegrasse to use it primarily for farming, but evidently also as transport over the uneven terrain of archaeological sites

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(Murray 1999: 45). These films then, were the perfect medium to combine his love for motor-vehicles with his love for archaeology (and perhaps the limelight as well).13 It is a playful scene: unexpected, comedic, and memorable.

I do not suggest that Keiller aimed to make a documentary – such a claim would be anachronistic as the genre had yet to take form at this time. Instead his films were in and of their time: a combination of the fun of actualités and newsreels, of the seriousness of lecture films, and the surprise of amateur home-movie making. But nonetheless Keiller’s films do exhibit aspects of documentary: his documentation of stratigraphy and field methods demonstrates the use of film as an indexical document of reality; his playful and experimental editing suggests the influence of the avant-garde and a fledgling authorial voice; and his use of characters, chapter-based approach to assembling, and beginning-middle-end structure, indicate an attempt plot the films’ sequence around an authored rhetorical argument. And while none of Nichols’ documentary criteria are fully realized as a narrative, Keiller’s films nonetheless are an unmistakable stepping stone from the purist attempts at scientific recording by Harry Burton, towards what would be the first archaeology documentaries.

4.3.6 Burton, Keiller, and the archaeology lecture film

Independent of the film industry, scholars first began to produce scientific lecture films in 1899, initially by creating actualités of surgery demonstrations or anthropological scenes, with more fields of study taking up the practice in the 1910s and 1920s (Popple and Kember 2004: 53). As filmmakers developed increasingly sophisticated storytelling techniques, and as manufacturers invented ways to produce longer reels of film stock, the role of the film as an illustrative tool accompanying a live lecture began to reverse and the lecturers increasingly began to simply describe the action shown on film (Popple and Kember 2004: 109). In Burton and Keiller’s films we can see two different approaches taken by archaeologists towards adopting non-fiction filmmaking to document and communicate their excavations.

The primary motive for Burton, Lythgoe, and Harkness to experiment with filmmaking, and the reason Carter supported it, appears to have been to create

13 Coincidently, excavations at Avebury during the 1990s even revealed a section of the vehicle’s distinctive ‘caterpillar’ track in a dried pond at the site, dated to Keiller’s 1930s Avebury project (Murray 1999: 44).

134 Chapter 4 professional lecture films – although there seems to have been something of a “home-movies” reception of the final footage as well. Lecture films were used alongside lantern slides for Carter’s lecture tour in 1923, as reported by the London Times, who described one audience’s applause at the sight of the moving “wild scenery” of the Valley of Kings (‘Tutankhamen’ [sic], Saturday, 22nd

September 1923, in Riggs 2016: 276, 278). On 10th June 1924, while in New York, Minnie also mentions that:

“we went on the Museum, where we saw the movies taken by Harry, Mr Lythgoe & Mr Harkness last season in Egypt, on board the Khonsu etc. Mr Bull there & Percy White, Théy, the Lythgoes & Mr Winlock had tea with us at the Plaza.” (GI/MB: 10/06/1924).

Later, on 1st August, in New London (near Boston), Minnie notes how:

“After dinner we had movies of Egypt in the drawing room” with Harkness and Lythgoe. The following two nights were followed with more “movies” (GI/MB: 1/08/1924).

Likewise, Burton notes in a letter to Lythgoe that the films of excavations at Deir el-Bahri and a mummy unwrapping were also shown to the Expedition Egyptian staff:

“One thing I think I forgot to mention + that was, that we gave the men a cinema show before the camp broke up. We had it on the mandera outside your room + it was a great success + was much appreciated as many of them had never seen a “movie” before…” (10/5/1925; MMA/HB, 1924-9, Riggs 2019: 146; Riggs 2018b).

Cautiously presuming Burton’s films were only edited into one compilation, the same cut would have been screened for both interested public audiences (via Carter’s lecture tour), as well as gatherings of archaeological peers, and to friends at family in intimate arenas such as the home. In comparison, Keiller’s films appear to have been targeted at two different audiences. His 1930s films, which intercut archaeology and skiing, were perhaps a form of home movie (Thornton 2016b: 40). In contrast, his aforementioned 1925 films were clearly aimed at an archaeologically informed audience – although frustratingly there is no record of his films in the official reports of excavations, lecture descriptions, or proceedings minutes (unless they are implied under the term “exhibits,” or as lanternslides (Keiller 1934; Keiller 1965). This is suggested by the use of

135 Chapter 4 archaeological terminology of the intertitles and the visual narration about the archaeological features (as gestured to by Keiller in the film). Additionally, the breathing spaces edited into the film’s structure, such as the lengthy shots (e.g. the 40-second view of the site plan), and his illustrative gesturing to the camera, suggests screenings would have been accompanied by a live narrator to speak to the images (presumably Keiller himself).

Although the use of film lectures by lecture societies began to wane in the 1930s (Popple and Kember 2004: 82), in archaeology the practice seems to have flourished perhaps due to archaeology’s distinct dependence on visualisations to communicate concepts and ideas. From the mid 1920s onward Burton and Keiller were soon joined in their filmmaking efforts by other archaeologists. With motives very similar to Burton and Keiller, George R. Swain, at the request of Francis Willey Kelsey, attempted professional filmmaking at Karanis in Egypt between 1928 and 1930 (for a full account see Wilfong 2014). Further filming of other archaeological excavations included work either by or attributed to archaeologists Elinor Gardner, G.L Harding, Reginald Campbell Thompson, Dorothy Garrod, and Alonzo Pond, to name only a few (some of those available online are listed by the Filming Antiquity Project; see also Thornton 2016a, 2016b; Tarabulski 1989; for 1920s-30s German archaeology films see Stern 2007). Although not archaeologists, Agatha Christie (working for her husband Max Mallowan) and filmmaker John V. Hansen also made well-crafted amateur films of excavations, archaeological sites, and their ethnographic contexts (Trümpler 2001; Smithsonian 2018). Confirmation for the use of these types of films as lecturing aids is evidenced by brochures for 1930s archaeological exhibitions in London which included film schedules “screened to complement the displays” (see Figure 4.1; Thornton 2016a: 7).

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Figure 4.1: Invitation to the “Exhibition of Antiquities from Lachish Palestine, at Wellcome Research Institute in London, either 1937 or 1938 [Source: Thornton 2016a: 7 (Reproduced with permission of the Palestine Exploration Fund © 2019)].

It is also worth noting that Burton and Keiller’s films not only mark the beginning of archaeologists’ experimentations with filmmaking, but they are also two of the few attempts by archaeologists to attain a professional standard of production. Both Burton and Keiller filmed on 35-mm stock which would have necessitated the use of professional cameras. In her diary Minnie mentions how she and Burton even went to Hollywood so Burton could spend time “with some cinema men” to refine his filmmaking techniques (30 June – 1 July, GI/MB: 1924). Hill elaborates on this, stating that Burton visited several studios including Pacific, Lasky Co. of Famous Players, Universal and Warner Bros, as facilitated by Edward Harkness, a supporter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so that Burton could specifically receive training in electric lighting for filmmaking (1997: 76-7). Burton found the trip disappointing however – the studios were unwilling to share their trade secrets and the ‘colossal’ lighting arrangements and generators were unfeasible for the excavation space he had to work in (Burton to Lythgoe, 1 July 1924, MMA/HB:1924-29, in Riggs 2019: 95). Keiller on the other hand appears to have had no significant difficulties processing his footage and learning to improve his techniques from viewing his rushes (or if he did, we have no evidence of it).

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Burton and Keiller’s appetites as viewers and consumers no doubt influenced their practice as well. As owner of a cinema projector, Keiller likely also collected or rented films for home viewing. Film culture was also a daily part of Minnie and Harry’s lives. Through 1923 and 1924 Minnie regularly makes note of their nightly attendance at both hotel and purpose-built cinemas in New York and Hollywood while accompanying Burton on tour, such as attending “Graumont’s [sic] Egyptian Theatre to see “Ten Commandments”” (GI/MB: 2/07/1924).

The rest of this first generation of filmmaking archaeologists appears to have embraced a more amateur approach to filmmaking by using amateur cameras with 16-mm stock. It is important to keep in mind then that during this time, although the new options of amateur film equipment were cheaper, easier to operate, and safer (16-mm stock was made from cellulose acetate as a film base, rather than easily combustible nitrate which was also difficult to extinguish), manufacturers intentionally designed amateur equipment in such a way as to prevent duplication of the final films stock, to prevent such films entering the market and competing for cinema distribution or home rental. Additionally, the lower quality of the 16mm image was snubbed as sub-standard by industry-based filmmakers. This differentiation was part of an attempt by the camera and film stock manufacturing companies (via the consortium of the Motion Picture Patent Company) to literally engineer a technological division between the amateur and professional film sectors (for a full account see Zimmermann 1995). By deliberately building limitations into film stocks, three camera companies created and monopolized two new separate markets for amateur and professional film production and distribution. This introduced a powerful barrier to any newcomers seeking to enter the professional film industry. Therefore, during this period, archaeologists who chose to use amateur equipment were effectively excluded from not only the distribution networks of the film industry, but from the professional filmmaking community altogether. Thus, although archaeologists were increasingly adopting filmmaking as part of their archaeological recording and lecturing practices, outside of specialist lecturing events, archaeology on public screens in the 1920s remained very much the preserve of the competitive and aggressive newsreel companies.

4.3.7 Meanwhile, the documentary genre takes form

During the 1920s, as the newsreels pushed archaeology into the limelight, and as archaeologists began to experiment with creating lecture films for their peers and

138 Chapter 4 colleagues, a new film genre was also taking form. One year prior to First Peeps and a few years prior to Burton and Keiller’s experiments with filmmaking, American director Robert Flaherty had released the seminal Nanook of the North (1922), which has retrospectively earned the honorific of being the first feature- length documentary film.14 In this dynamic period, the term ‘documentary’ was particularly fluid: it was first used in English by Scottish filmmaker John Grierson (who would later become known as the “father of documentary”), when reviewing another of Flaherty’s films, Moana (1926). Grierson anglicized the term from a French word used for actualité films, ‘documentaire’ (New York Sun, 8th February 1926; Chuck Wolfe, in Carroll 2003: 220; Grierson 1979: 11). Grierson’s use, in full, was as follows:

“Of course, Moana being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value. But that I believe is secondary to its value as a soft breath from a sunlit island washed by a marvellous sea as warm as the balmy air. Moana is first of all beautiful as nature is beautiful…” (8th February 1926: 11, cited in Ward 2005: 103).

We can see then that Grierson’s original use of the term ‘documentary’ was to describe the literal documentary quality of the film (what Nichols calls indexical documentation), and to position it as secondary to the artistic values of the film (as expressed through poetic experimentation, narrative, and rhetoric). But, riding on the back of the Flaherty’s success, the term ‘documentary’ quickly gained international traction and Grierson later revised his definition for the new non-fiction genre. He fiercely sought to distance documentary from the other non-fiction film forms of the day such as newsreels and lecture films, criticizing them as “lower” art forms:

“Where the camera shot on the spot (whether it shot newsreel items or magazine items or discursive ‘interests’ or dramatized ‘interests’ or educational films or scientific films proper or Changs or Rangos) in that fact was documentary. […] They all represent different qualities of observation, very different powers and ambitions at the stage of organising material. I propose, therefore, after a brief word on the lower

14 Flaherty is also a founding figure of ethnographic filmmaking. For thoughtful accounts of the controversial Nanook of the North, see McDougall (1998: 134); and Nichols (2017: 108).

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categories, to use the documentary description exclusively of the higher.” (Grierson, 1932: 35)

Grierson’s rejection of newsreel – such as First Peeps – was particularly brutal:

“With their money-making eye (their almost only eye) glued like the newsreels to vast and speedy audiences, they avoid on one hand the consideration of solid material, and escape, on the other, the solid consideration of any material. Within these limits, they are often brilliantly done. But ten in a row would bore the average human to death. Their reaching out for the flippant or popular touch is so completely far- reaching that it dislocates something. Possibly taste; possibly common sense. You may take your choice at those little theatres where you are invited to gad around the world in fifty minutes. It takes only that long – in these days of great invention – to see almost everything.” (Grierson, 1932: 35-6)

One wonders if Carter and the other archaeologists who had come into conflict with newsreels might have agreed with Grierson. Yet Grierson was equally critical of lecture films:

“These films, of course, would not like to be called lecture films, but this, for all their disguises is what they are. They do not dramatize, they do not even dramatize an episode: they describe, and even expose, but in any aesthetic sense, only rarely reveal. Herein is their formal limit, and it is unlikely that they will make any considerable contribution to the fuller art of documentary. How indeed can they? Their silent form is cut to the commentary, and shots are arranged arbitrarily to point the gags or conclusions. This is not a matter of complaint, for the lecture film must have increasing value in entertainment, education, and propaganda. But it is well to establish the formal limits of the species.” (Grierson, 1966: 36)

Only amateur filmmaking was positively received by Grierson and his budding documentary community – such as Paul Rotha’s respectful acknowledgment of “the number of distinguished filmmakers who began with their own 16-mm equipment.” (Nicholson 2012: 1).

For the fledgling genre of documentary then, the 1920s was as much a time of fluidity and experimentation as it was of strict genre boundaries. But in contrast

140 Chapter 4 to the flexibility of the creativity and discourse of documentary filmmaking as a practice, the wider film industry was becoming more regulated and restrictive. 1927 amendments to the British Cinematographic Act (1909) introduced new criteria and quotas for exhibition programming and film rentals, criteria which the documentary did not match (e.g. only “wholly or mainly news and current events”, “natural scenery,” or “views of buildings,” Rotha 1936: 20). From the outset then, the documentary genre would struggle to compete with the more accepted cinema formats such as the increasingly recycled actualités, newsreels, and fictional feature films (Rotha 1936: 20).

4.4 1935: Together at last – the earliest known archaeology documentary and its influences

The late 1920s and 1930s witnessed a coalescing of new cinematic technologies such as sound recording and early television, with artistic practices like avant- garde surrealism, all against a backdrop of global social and political upheaval (the Great Depression, increasing class tensions, rising fascism and socialism, and the beginnings of decolonisation). Such were the conditions in which the new genre of documentary not only took form but found and grew its audience (Nichols 2016: 33). Emerging in tandem during this period were two major documentary movements which competed for artistic, social, and commercial influence: Soviet avant-garde cinema and the British documentary movement.15 Within this first decade of documentary’s emergence came what may have been the first archaeology documentary: L’Île de Pâques (1935). L’Île de Pâques was the first non-fiction archaeology film that meets all four of Nichols’ criteria for documentary status, and it falls squarely between the Soviet and British movements. To understand how and why the first archaeology documentary was made, we must take a moment to consider the state of documentary filmmaking at the time, and the respective backgrounds of the two men – the filmmaker and the archaeologist – who together would co-author L’Île de Pâques.

4.4.1 The Soviet avant-garde movement

Avant-garde cinema arose in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s as a backlash against the ‘elite’ art forms of literature and theatre, as well as the literalism of

15 There were also American and Continental varieties of documentary during this time, but it is the Soviet and British strands that would come to define the genre.

141 Chapter 4 lecture films and newsreels, and the fakery of fiction or ‘story-films’. In contrast with the increasingly dominant Hollywood films, the avant-garde movement advanced an experimental film practice where film’s capacity for indexical documentation (via photographic realism) was intentionally brought into question by filmmakers and audiences deploying modernist editing techniques such as fragmentation, familiarization, collage, abstraction, and anti-illusionism (Nichols 2016: 21).

One of the pioneers of avant-garde cinema was Dziga Vertov (Denis Arkadievich Kaufman), whose iconic Man with A Movie Camera (1929) became a paragon of the movement. A Marxist and polemicist, the Moscow-based Vertov advocated for a revolutionary filmmaking ideology that would honour:

“…the ‘unplayed’ [or unscripted] film over the play film, to substitute the document for mise-en-scène, to break out of the proscenium of the theatre and to enter the arena of life itself…” (Aufderheide 2007: 38, my emphasis).

Vertov intended his creed to be applied not merely to a new genre of film but to all films hence forth, whilst all past films were to be ‘sentenced to death’ (Vertov 1984:138, in Grant and Sloniowski 1998: 41; Nichols 2016: 239). For example, in Vertov’s iconic Man with A Movie Camera, “life itself” manifests as a combination of staged and actualité footage depicting ‘a day in the life’ of an idealised, futurist Soviet Russia. We see “life caught unaware” through the mechanical camera lens: from coverage of a bloody medical crisis inside a speeding ambulance (possibly staged), to seeing the camera’s view and the film editing process on screen itself.

Vertov and the other avant-garde practitioners took realism further than merely capturing it and relaying it:

“…it is not enough to show bits of truth on screen, separate frames of truth. These frames must be thematically organised so that the whole is also a truth.” (1925, quoted in Aufderheide 2007: 40, my emphasis).

By deploying poetic experimentation in the editing suite (such as montage, dissolves, double exposures, Dutch angles, jump-cuts, split screens, and time warping techniques), Vertov visually drew attention to technology’s role in shaping the story, visually making manifest his own rhetoric.

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Somewhat tragically, Vertov’s work was dismissed within the both the domestic and international film industries (including by Eisenstein, Grierson, and Rotha), and he was eventually reduced to obscurity, editing newsreels and documentaries celebrating Stalin for the remainder of his career (Barnouw 1993: 66; Aufderheide 2007: 42; Grant and Sloniowski 1998: 53). It would not be until 1963 that Vertov’s work and cinematic legacy was rediscovered by film historian George Sadoul, and became an inspiration to cinéma vérité and French new wave filmmakers such as Jean Rouch and Jean-Luc Goddard (Grant and Sloniowski 1998: 51; Aufderheide 2007: 60; Barnouw 1993: 254), eventually leading to the critical acclaim in 2014 that Man with a Movie Camera was the greatest documentary film of all time (Winston 2017b). Likewise, after a long period of omission, documentary’s wider avant-garde roots have only recently been accepted into the genre’s history (see Carroll 2003, Renov 2004, and Nichols 2017). According to Nichols, and despite Grierson and his follower’s claims to the contrary, it was in Soviet avant-garde cinema that the four documentary elements of indexicality, narrative, poetic experimentation and rhetoric came together to form the first documentaries, paving the way for the British Documentary movement which in turn would cement the genre internationally as a cinematic staple 2016: 15; 2017: 102-3).

4.4.2 British documentary movement

John Grierson was vehemently opposed to Soviet avant-guard cinema, despite its undeniable influence upon his own practice – as a beginning filmmaker he had cut his teeth distributing Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Strike (1925), and editing English titles for Victor Turin’s Turksib (1929) (Ward 2005: 3). Despite this, Grierson and his fellow filmmaker and co-theorist Paul Rotha were derisive of Vertov and the avant-garde film movement:

“Vertov we regarded really as rather a joke. All this cutting, and one camera photographing another camera photographing another camera – it was all trickery, and we didn’t take it seriously,” (Rotha, cited in Winston 2017b).

Likewise Grierson and Rotha were fervently opposed to fictional filmmaking. Rotha could barely hold back his disgust at Hollywood’s “whoredom” and “sewerage,” a sector of the film industry he considered “parasitic to society,” (Rotha 1973: xxii). As previously mentioned, 1926 Grierson had already used the

143 Chapter 4 term ‘documentary’ to describe Flaherty’s film Moana in 1926. By 1932 Grierson admitted of his earlier definition:

“Documentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand. The French who first used the term only meant travelogue. […] Meanwhile documentary has gone on its way.” (1932: 35).

He continued to dwell on the term however, and in 1933 he published a new definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” (in ‘The Documentary Producer’, Cinema Quarterly, quoted in Ward 2005: 10). This definition moved non-fiction filmmaking beyond rote description or factual reproduction, to instead allow room for not only creative expression, but journalistic, historical, and socially relevant interpretations, all from an authored perspective (whether multiple or singular). Its flexibility gave the Griersonian ‘documentary’ movement currency across the decades: it is still the definition used within both industry and scholarship. However, it has also proved something of an artistic, legal and ethical paradox for the genre ever since: at once rejecting the requirement to ‘objectively’ depict reality, while simultaneously laying a claim to truthfulness via documentary’s depiction of reality.

Returning to the 1930s, Rotha’s writings again provides a sense of the documentary genre as proponents of the British Movement envisioned it in its day:

“If its aim were simply to describe for historical value, accuracy would be its main endeavour. But it asks creation in dramatic form to bring alive the modern world. It asks understanding of human values and knowledge of the issues governing our society to-day as well as in the past. It asks for the mind of the trained sociologist as well as the abilities of the professional film technician. Thus, in criticism, the functions and development of the documentary film should be kept distinct from those of the amusement cinema.” (Rotha 1936: 16, 17)

Documentary then was to be not merely the scientific recording of reality, nor glib entertainment. Rather it would be an authored, creative endeavour driven by an underlying social mission. For Grierson and Rotha this was proposed as a form of beneficent “propaganda” in service of a benevolent nation state. Again, Rotha gives an insightful sense of the scope of the movement’s aims, which deserves quoting in full:

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“Whether it be warfare or collective security, the abolition of class or a continuance of some kind of democracy, the establishment of nationalist systems or a world of united races and peoples, or the final collapse of capitalism before the forces of socialism – documentary must always be dictated by the needs of society. What shape that society will assume lies in our own hands and it is imperative that each one of us should realise this. The documentary method is only a channel of expression. The most important question of all is: What sort of propaganda shall we allow it to project?” (Rotha: 1936: 241)

Thus, the British documentary movement was every bit as politicised as the Soviet avant-garde movement. Yet the point where the British movement endured and the Soviet faded was perhaps less a case of manifestos than an economic allegiance with both national and commercial powers. The experimental genre of documentary was a hard sell to 1930s film distributors and exhibitors: “seen in some areas as a dirty word, anathema in Wardour Street where it spelt bad box- office,” (Rotha 1973: xv). Although documentary films could also reach audiences via an alternative distribution pathways of cinema clubs, schools, churches, and libraries (Barnouw 1993: 95), the movement could never truly sustain itself in the commercial market. Financial as well as creative support was needed – leading Grierson to engineer a shrewd business strategy for documentary, determining that:

“…even under a controlled cinema and a televised cinema, it will be wise for the artist to organise his independence: going direct to public service for his material and his economy. There lies his best opportunity – and therefore his freedom.” (Grierson 1935: 69).

Whereas the combatant Vertov had burned his bridges with both fellow filmmakers and an increasingly oppressive Soviet government, Grierson, Rotha, and their fledgling community of documentary filmmakers found a way to maintain their artistic, activist, and socialist interests by embracing the role of propagandists – sponsored by and subservient to the British government. Thus in 1930 Grierson established the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), which would later be replaced by the General Post Office Film Unit (GPO), leading to a series of Shell Film units on every continent, the growing film team producing documentary films in favour of the British Empire (for a full account see Barnouw 1993). Thus, by cementing government sponsorship of documentary productions Grierson successfully established a stable base for the genre to take root and grow,

145 Chapter 4 enabling it to expand via the British Empire’s influence into India and Canada (Nichols 2017: 93). How then, did archaeology fit into this dynamic early documentary landscape?

4.4.3 Henri Storck and early Belgian documentary

Henri Storck was a pivotal figure in both Belgian cinema and in the emergence of the documentary genre, credited with influencing the work of John Grierson and the British documentary movement – although as for other filmmakers of the avant-garde, the value of his work is only beginning to be fully appreciated in English-language scholarship (Ivens 1969: 93; Bergan 1999).16 An admirer of Flaherty’s, Storck’s early films quickly evolved from avant-guard poetic essays into feature-length social critiques. Coincidentally, Storck first encountered archaeology on film indirectly, during one of his early essay films, when re-editing old newsreel footage of an archaeological excavation of a grave into the anti-war and anti-Church satire Histoire Du Soldat Inconnu (1932) – a film that was quickly banned by French authorities (Still 4.15).

Still 4.15: Newsreel footage of an archaeological excavation of a skeleton used by Storck in Histoire Du Soldat Inconnu (1932), implied via montage to be a modern soldier's grave (although appears in fact to be Bronze Age or Migration period) [Source: Histoire Du Soldat Inconnu 1932 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019)].

16 Regrettably, my study of Henri Storck’s work and its relationship to archaeology was limited to scholarship and films translated into English. Further research is necessary to better bridge this language divide.

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But it was the gritty Misère au Borinage which launched Storck’s career and helped him find his own visual and authorial voice, setting the terms of his overall approach to documentary filmmaking. In 1932 the 26-year-old Storck sought out Joris Ivens to help him co-direct a film reporting on the destitution of the families of 30,000 miners who had been striking in the Borinage district in Belgium (Ivens 1969). It was filmed illicitly under the nose of police, with the filmmakers at times enduring police beatings and resorting to secretly smuggling footage out to Brussels (Ivens 1969: 92). The filmmakers deliberately sacrificed journalistic objectivity for the depth of subjective visual testimony, enabling a powerful critique of Church, state, and capitalism (such as by juxtaposing mining family homelessness against the building of a new Church, as shown in Stills 4.17). Going against the prevailing cinema orthodoxy of the day Storck and Ivens also resolved to embrace simplistic and deliberately ugly cinematography in an effort to visually represent the unpleasantness of the miners’ reality (Ivens 1969: 88) (see Still 4.16). Their decision brings to mind Lucien Taylor’s perceptive characterisation of visual storytelling: “for what are aesthetics if not an expression of a filmmaker’s ethics?” (Taylor 1998: 12).

Stills 4.16: Scenes from Misère au Borinage documenting the working conditions and living spaces of the Borinage miners and their families [Source:

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Misère au Borinage (1933) (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019)].

To Ivens, the aim of Misère au Borinage was not to merely relay without interpretation the events depicted, nor to inspire fundraising to support the strikers. Rather the film was a “weapon” of class struggle, “a fighting point of view” (1969: 89).

Stills 4.17: Scene from Misère au Borinage contrasting the building of a new Church with the surrounding impoverished accommodation of the Borinage families (see the two children in the foreground) [Source:

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Misère au Borinage (1933) (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019)].

Storck’s account of the film gives a sense of his motivation to film:

Misère au Borinage is a report, so to speak, it is not a written documentary, or a film made after a study of a subject matter, with a point of view. It is a very sincere and passionate statement because Joris and I were deeply moved by the living conditions and poverty of these people… We wanted to reveal how Dantesque, how infernal this working- class world was, how they suffered unimaginable poverty, the degradation, the resignation, the revolt. We felt a sense of intimate participation in the life of these people, and were convinced that the document itself would suffice, that it would communicate its horrific significance to most audiences, which for the most part have no idea that such lives exist… (Henri Storck, Documentary explorations, G. Leroy Levin, New York, Double day, 1971 (FHS 2018))

Misère au Borinage gives us a sense of Storck’s political and creative inclinations, such as his fusion of both avant-garde and documentary realism for his own film practice. As we shall see, Storck’s experience filming Misère au Borinage would come to have a profound influence on what was arguably the first archaeology documentary, released in 1935: L’Île de Pâques.

4.4.4 Henri Lavachery and the Rapa Nui Expedition

From July 1934 through to January 1935, archaeologist Henri Lavachery and Alfred Métraux conducted a Franco-Belgian archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic survey of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) (Lavachery 1936).17 The expedition was initiated by Professor Paul Rivet. Although originally led by French archaeologist Louis-Charles Watelin, his death on the voyage to Rapa Nui necessitated Lavachery take charge of the archaeological investigation, while Swiss ethnographer Métraux took charge of the ethnographic and linguistic

17 Although Rapa Nui is called ‘Easter Island’ in archaeological publications, or as ‘Isla de Pascua’ in Spanish language contexts (as the island is a Chilean territory), I have chosen to use the name of the island which its residents (also called the ‘Rapa Nui’) use and which is increasingly used in broader scholarship and media representations of the island.

149 Chapter 4 fieldwork, and a Dr Drapkin was assigned by the Chilean government to study the problem of leprosy on the island.

Due to the island’s thin soil the expedition decided not to conduct excavations, relying instead on surveying and ethnography. Lavachery opposed earlier claims that the petroglyphs and statues on Rapa Nui had been built by an ancient population that had mysteriously vanished, instead arguing that the monuments had been constructed by the direct ancestors of the current Polynesian population around the twelfth century, as demonstrated by both archaeological and ethnographic evidence (Lavachery 1936). Lavachery’s study has been credited as the first scientific archaeological investigation of Rapa Nui,18 and – after decades of debate – his genealogically-based twelfth-century designation for Polynesian colonisation of the island has since been confirmed by radio-carbon studies (Hunt and Lipo 2006). Lavachery later became chief curator of the Belgian Royal Museum of Art and History, and the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium established an ethnography prize in his name, The Prix Henri Lavachery.

But Lavachery’s role in making L’Île de Pâques – a key product of the 1934 expedition – has been entirely overlooked by archaeological, anthropological, and film scholarship. Perhaps this was due to the baffling decision by both Lavachery and Métraux to not acknowledge the film in their respective publications on the expedition – not even as a source of ethnographic evidence (Lavachery 1936; Métraux 1940).

Storck had just established his own production company “Cinema-Edition- Production” (CEP), and through it had been commissioned by the Belgian government to document the voyage (with the support of the French Navy and indirectly, the National Belgian Fund for Scientific Research who had sponsored the expedition). Storck however, chose not to undertake the 8-month trip himself, instead employing Joris Ivens former cameraman John Fernhout to collect footage of the sailing journey and of Rapa Nui’s environment and society, focusing on Rapa Nui professions, traditions, economic motivations, as well as the Belgian expedition (Fernhout can be seen filming on the island in Still 4.18) (Davay 1973, in FHS 2018a). The resulting 35-mm black and white footage was brought back to Paris for Storck to edit it into three films, in a kind of triptych, one of which was

18 Although archaeologists have since acknowledged the importance of earlier work by W.J. Thomson in 1886, and Katherine Routledge in 1914. The comprehensiveness of Laverchery’s work was called into question by Lee 2003: 4; and Van Tilburg 2003; 2009a.

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L’Île de Pâques (1935).19 This film is a not only remarkable record of Rapa Nui in 1934, but is arguably also the first film that can legitimately be considered an archaeology documentary.

Still 4.18: John Fernhout precariously balanced in his pursuit of the perfect shot, during the 1934-35 expedition to Rapa Nui [Source: Fonds Henri Storck Website 2019 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019) (Reproduced with consent of CODEIPA Rapa Nui)].

At just over 23 minutes a close reading of L’Île de Pâques is too unwieldly to include in this thesis. Instead I have selected two segments of the film that best demonstrate how it fulfils Nichols’ criteria for documentary status by incorporating elements of indexical documentation, poetic experimentation, narrative storytelling, and rhetorical address (Nichols 2017: 93). Additionally, I consider the implications of Lavachery’s role in scripting the film commentary, and in doing so, co-authoring the films rhetoric and narrative.

4.4.5 L’Île de Pâques: The earliest known archaeology documentary

Throughout L’Île de Pâques, Storck makes powerful use of indexical documentation, poetic experimentation, narrative storytelling, and rhetorical address – Nichols’ four criteria for determining the documentary status of a film. These elements are interdependent, but through close examination they can be

19 The other two films, A South Sea Voyage (1935) and The Three Master Mercator (1935), documented the same voyage with a focus on tourism and sailing respectively.

151 Chapter 4 examined separately as well, allowing us to understand how the film and its archaeological story was constructed and likely received.

Storck’s most notable application of poetic experimentation are the graphic transitions that function as chapter markers (changing frames that slide, swirl, and splice into each other), and recurring striking montage sequences that create breathing spaces and provoking critical contemplation. He achieves this by using locked-off centred compositions culminating in leading camera movements (tilts and pans), and by repeatedly juxtaposing the Moai statues against aspects of modern island life. Two segments, discussed below, nicely demonstrate Storck’s masterful fusing of film footage (indexicality); commentary (narrative and rhetoric); and surrealist editing and music (poetic experimentation and rhetoric). Additionally, they also demonstrate how Storck used these techniques to make social critique.

In the film, we (the audience) are brought by sailing ship to the island, seeing it as sailors would first see it, but with the benefit of commentary (by the film’s composer Maurice Jaubert) about its history, geography, and the expedition’s aims. Finally, after surveying the landscape, we are finally introduced to the famous Moai statues. An unseen commentator guides us, shifting back and forth between detailed scientific explanation and poetic prose. It is Jaubert, and his cadence is even, his tone confident, and significantly – especially given that he never actually stepped foot on the island – he seems authoritative.20 Jaubert intones how:

“Weathered by the rain, majestic and mysterious, they tower over the eternal silence of a seascape at the very end of the world.”

Ominous music builds to a crescendo, the camera pans slowly up the island’s striking landscape, up to our first distant view of the Moai standing like sentries upon a hill side. This is the quarry of the extinct volcano Rano Raraku, the site from which most the island’s Moai statues originated. Suddenly a low horn sounds a warning, and a swirling transition cut transports us up close to one of the Moai (Still 4.19).21

20 The text used in this thesis is based on English subtitles of the film, as provided for the digitized version available from the Foundation Henri Storck (FHS). As often happens in translation via subtitling, there is a likelihood that some meanings and cultural nuances have been lost in translation. 21 Upon close inspection, I have identified one of the first Moai in the film as Moai Hinariri, designation RR-089 according to the Terevaka Moai database. I have not attempted to

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Stills 4.19: Sequence introducing the Moai in L’Île de Pâques. (Clockwise from top left): The first view we have of the distant Moai; a sudden swirling transition takes us closer; and this first close up deliberately includes modern people in the account [Source: L’Île de Pâques 1935 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019) (Reproduced with consent of CODEIPA Rapa Nui)].

But we are not alone with them and neither are they timeless: the Moai share the frame with a modern person riding a horse, passing between them. In this way L’Île de Pâques arguably contradicts Allan’s notion of film as a tool for anti- monumentalisation, as encountered in Les Pyramids 35 years prior. Although L’Île de Pâques situates the Moai in the modern world with modern people, they also

identify all the Moai featured in Storck’s film, but this could be a worthy future research endeavor (see Terevaka 2018; Shepardson et al. 2015).

153 Chapter 4 have a haunting quality that is not of the contemporary world, instead they seem to speak to us across time. A clanging gong and haunting male chorus join the deep timbre of horns, guiding us through a montage of the Moai that occupy the southern outer slopes of Rano Raraku. The Moai are shown standing or lying partially submerged beneath the soil, in isolation or in clusters, seen at a distance or so close you might touch them. We follow their gaze out across the open pastoral landscape, and we see what they see. We witness the expedition members making their notes, leaning on and sitting beside the massive statues, their horses tethered at the base of the statues.

The foreboding chorus rises to become an overwhelming fanfare of alarming horns and a hymn-like chorus, and the Moai are shown in extreme close-up, filling the frame, towering over us. A final pan across Rano Raraku quarry – and we can now see that there are hundreds more Moai (Stills 4.20).

Stills 4.20: Deconstructing the Moai montage in L’Île de Pâques. (Clockwise from top left): The montage takes us closer to the Moai until we see them eye-to-eye, before pulling back to reveal hundreds of Moai in the landscape, ending on a jagged swirling transition to the next scene [Source: L’Île de Pâques 1935 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019) (Reproduced with consent of CODEIPA Rapa Nui)].

Another graphic transition (this time the frame spins into another); a shift to more adventurous music, and we are shown a sequence following Alfred Métraux walking by the rock art at the Orongo cliff-side, and climbing inside ‘Heou cave’, one of the stone houses of Orongo Village. As Métraux walks and climbs through the site, Jaubert narrates the cultural significance of the Bird God Maké-Maké and the Tangata-Manu (Bird-man) cult. The petroglyphs are stark in their detail due to what appears to be white paint, possibly added for the sake of filming (Pollard 2018; for a discussion on the repainting of petroglyphs see Lee 1992).

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Another transition (a cross), and we shift to a more familiar view: the white wooden Church of Hanga Roa village, nestled amid lofty trees, its parish filing inside. Jaubert reminds us:

“The monuments of the past mustn’t make us forget the living.”

We observe the church service as the people enter, Jaubert pointing out how poor they are (dressed in “shabby” second hand clothing from passing ships), and how little they have (not even a priest for this dedicated Catholic community). The crowded mass is austere, the attendees serious, the music now a women’s sombre hymn with organ accompaniment. Then, via a smooth diagonal slicing transition and without a break in the music, we return to the stony gaze of one of the Rano Raraku Moai, and then back again to the church. The link between the awe-inspiring past and the humbled present – between the Moai makers and their modern, impoverished, Depression-era descendants – is made painfully clear.

Still 4.21: Scene in L’Île de Pâques contrasting the austere Catholic Church at Hanga Roa with the (so-narrated) “shabbily dressed” children in the foreground. The scene has clear parallels with Misère au Borinage [Source: L’Île de Pâques 1935 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019) (Reproduced with consent of CODEIPA Rapa Nui)].

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The story gets worse before it gets better. Jaubert’s voice returns to guide us to the island’s leper colony, a solitary wooden hut housing 22 residents behind a low stone wall, imprisoned by the threat of death if they leave it (Still 4.22). As in Borinage, the contrast between the physical state of the Church building and the lepers’ living accommodation serves as a striking indictment of the social order on the island (see Stills 4.17, 4.21 and 4.22). At the open gate, we meet a young boy with no fingers and a collapsing face playing a cheerful tune on a harmonica, while an equally deformed girl claps along, and a man with stumps for feet and hands sits on the veranda savouring a cigarette.

Still 4.22: A sombre sequence profiling the leper colony in L’Île de Pâques. (Clockwise from top left): the view of the isolated ‘Lepers Hut’, a young boy playing a harmonica, a sliding transition back to a Moai, as though watching the boy across time. Subtitles are a later addition [Source: L’Île de Pâques 1935 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019) (Reproduced with consent of CODEIPA Rapa Nui)].

The indexicality inscribed in Fernhout’s cinematography is unflinching, it forces our gaze to see and to contemplate. Another gong, another transition (vertical slices this time), and we return to the Moai. The rest of the film follows this editing formula: we attend a funeral of a leprosy victim, before visiting

156 Chapter 4 woodcarver and local informant Juan Tepano and his ailing mother.22 Then an up- beat shift: we are immersed in a community performance of dozens of traditional dances, the performers dressed in sailors’ costumes from around the world. These images are repeatedly juxtaposed against the stony gaze of the Moai – as though the ancestors are watching not only their descendants, but gazing back at the film’s audience: us. Thus, not only do we see the Moai, but they see us – eye to eye.

The role of sound in the emergence of the documentary genre cannot be understated. In designing the sound of L’Île de Pâques, Storck and his collaborators were both aided and limited by the technologies of the time. Studio- based sound recording slowly became a standard in fiction filmmaking (as “talkies”) in the late 1920s, albeit slowed by the distribution end of the industry, as cinemas struggled to afford the expensive upgrades required to be able to play the new sound films, all during an era of studio bankruptcy due to the Great Depression. As for documentary, there was a 7-year lag for sound recording to be adopted due to the technology not allowing for the spontaneous or on-location recording which the genre required (Rotha 1936: 238). As in fiction films, early documentarists like Storck were restricted to recording sound after filming had taken place, usually manufactured in the confines of studios using cumbersome and immovable equipment. For L’Île de Pâques the soundtrack was created in the Pathé studios in Joint-le-Pont, Paris, using what was then a cutting-edge Marconi- Stille system that allowed magnetic tape sound recordings of up to half an hour (FSA 2018; Beckwith 2006). The technology necessitated a reliance on recited music and after-the-fact voice-recordings – rarely including the subjects that had been filmed. As such, although the Rapa Nui themselves were very much the subject of the film, unless a Rapa Nui spokesperson had been able to travel to Paris to take part in the film’s editing – highly unlikely – there was no way for them to truly have a voice in the film, or any input at all. Such limitations resulting from the sound recording technology of the time led to what is commonly referred to as ‘voice-of-God’ commentary, which came dominate and homogenize the documentary genre during this period.

Nichols argues that the introduction of voice-over commentary pushed early documentary audiences from a scopophilic experience of film (love of gazing) to

22 Juan Tepano Huki and his mother Viriamo Huki a Puhi a Kau are also the same elders who provided vital information to other Rapa Nui researchers, such as Katherine Routledge in 1919. See Tilburg (1994: 33).

157 Chapter 4 epistephilia (love of knowing) (2016: 59). Arguably however, such an epistephilia was likely also present in earlier screenings through the commentary of showmen and lecturers who ‘explained’ their non-fiction films to their audiences. The real innovation then was that the audio aspects of documentary films was now as much in the control of the filmmakers as the visual had been. Jaubert’s ‘voice-of- God’ offered the audience a powerful “point of identification with the film, a guide to take us through the succession of images, a moralizing centre around which a particular view of the world revolved” (Nichols 2016: 59). Commentary voices were always male, always modulated, knowledgeable, and self-assured – the forerunners of television commentators and presenters (Nichols 2016: 65). But they were not necessarily convincing – as quickly as documentarists mastered voice-over commentary as a narrative device, so too did film audiences once more modulate their reception of filmmaking conventions. In fact, the ‘voice-of-God’ so rapidly become a recognisable documentary convention that by 1932 documentarists were already satirising the voice-of-God device to knowing audiences (such as in Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes’ Tierra Sin Pan, 1932, see Aufderheide 2007: 13). Thus, by the time of its release in 1935, L’Île de Pâques audiences would have already be attuned to either accept or reject Jaubert’s commentary and accompanying score, recognise the absence of the subject’s own voices, and thus allow themselves to either be persuaded by or reject the film’s rhetoric. Yet to persuade audiences of the authority and authenticity of the story Storck had a secret weapon: the archaeologist Lavachery, who was brought on-board the film to write the commentary script.

4.4.6 Archaeology finds its voice

The script of L’Île de Pâques, the words that Jaubert would authoritatively perform as the film’s ‘voice-of-God,’ was authored by Henri Lavachery. This is stated explicitly in the film’s opening credits, along with Lavachery’s professional credentials to emphasise his expertise – a blatant rhetorical and authenticating device: “Commentary by Dr Henry Lavachery (sic) Chief Conservator of the Belgian Royal Museum of Art and History” and “Delegate of the Franco-Belgian Archaeological Mission to Easter Island.”

We do not know the degree of collaboration on the script between the author Lavachery, the performer Jaubert, and the director Storck, but comparison between Lavachery’s 1935 script and his later 1936 Antiquity publication is telling: the scientific article actually replicates the film script in structure, scope,

158 Chapter 4 and tone. Additionally, certain phrases and references are repeated across both media. Both open by playing upon and problematizing the popular mythical conceptions of the island as the summit of a submerged continent; and the landscape is described in each as “a mingling of black and yellow” and “a background of black and yellow” (Storck 1935; Lavachery 1936: 54; Plate V). Even one of Lavachery’s photographs of the Moai is taken from the exact same angle as one of Fernhout’s shots – perhaps more than a coincidence given Lavachery had over 800 Moai and infinite angles and positions to choose from, to feature in his article (see Still 4.23, from Storck 1935; Lavachery 1936: Plate V).

Still 4.23: Comparison of Lavachery’s Plate V photograph (1936) (Source: Lavachery 1936 (Reproduced with permission of Antiquity © 2019)] (left), and L’Île de Pâques opening scene (right) [Source: L’Île de Pâques 1935 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019) (Reproduced with consent of CODEIPA Rapa Nui)]. Evidently both Lavachery and Fernhout are taking the same shot, from the same position, with the same aspect, yet of course with different equipment, possibly made in tandem.

Most importantly, both Storck’s film and Lavachery’s article assert the same arguments and present the same evidence. Both advance the argument that the modern Polynesian population of Easter Island (as they called it) were the direct descendants of the people that made the statues and rock art. This is evidenced in both, by presenting the wood sculpting of Rapa Nui informant and community leader John Tepano as an example of the present population’s cultural and technological continuity with culture materials of the past. Secondly, both argue that the appalling impoverishment and diseased state of Rapa Nui society in the

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1930s was a tragedy largely attributable to the arrival and impact of Europeans, Peruvians, and Christianity on the island (Lavachery 1936: 60).

Yet the film’s most compelling application of rhetorical address occurs in the film’s closing sequence, which reveals that the purpose of the expedition is not merely to record the archaeology and ethnography of the island, but to collect samples of the Moai for the Belgian Royal Museum of Art and History. The sequence begins by introducing us to the site of ‘Hanga Oné Oné’, which Jaubert tells us is the statue of the tuna-fishers' God (today known as Pou Hakanononga) – a 2.75-m Moai leaning precariously forward near the beach at Hanga Roa Bay. Sailors approach Hanga Oné Oné carrying large wooden frames, and we are told:

“The Chilean government allowed us to take it away.

“You’ll never make it” said the inhabitants. “It’s too big and heavy.””

Already then, we are made aware that there is potential community opposition to the removal of the Moai.23 The sailors tie wooden frames to build an A-frame for a block and tackle pulley system, before painstakingly raising the statue from its resting place – under the stony gaze of other Moai and the ambivalent watch of Rapa Nui observers (sequence shown by stills 4.24). The shot of the Moai was in fact originally part of the earlier sequence in the film of the archaeological recording, but the image’s reuse here is no less powerful for its repetition, if anything it takes on a deeper meaning. A swirling transition and the crew has grown, the sailors are now joined by over a hundred Rapa Nui men, women, and children – and several excited dogs – collectively heaving the Moai across the landscape to the beach. Now the Rapa Nui are presented as though they are collaborators in the Moai’s removal.

23 Another Moai head was also collected during the 1934-1935 Belgian expedition, but it did not feature in the film. It is now housed in the Pavillon des Session, Musée du Lourve.

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Stills 4.24: Sequence near end of L’Île de Pâques showing the removal of Hanga Oné Oné, as some Rapa Nui and the Moai apparently watch on, while others are involved in towing the statue to the beach. Subtitles are a later addition [Source: L’Île de Pâques 1935 (Licensed and reproduced with permission of Fonds Henri Storck © 2019) (Reproduced with consent of CODEIPA Rapa Nui)].

The commentary claims:

“This is how the ancestors moved the big statues and the people helped, just as then.”

A mesmerising sequence of impromptu engineering works follows, documenting how over several days Hanga Oné Oné is transported by log sleds to the beach, floated into the water, navigated out from the rocky beach, lifted up the side of the ship – suspense and tension when he is nearly lost beneath the sea after the mast supporting him breaks – before finally being brought onto the ship’s deck. As the Moai is wrapped in netting and wooden slates to protect it from the weather, Jaubert unexpectedly cautions us this action is not necessarily a cause for celebration:

“The Easter Island fisherman’s God is made prisoner and the native women sing about the kidnapping of their God on their abandoned coast. Tepano’s wife, the sculptor, composed it:

Strangers came joyfully

They took Hanga Oné Oné away!

To put him on a grave in their land

And all the young Belgian girls will go and admire him.”

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These are the final words of the film, booming music once again ominous, before another montage of the ship being put to sail (bookending the opening sequence), a final eye-to-eye with one of the island’s remaining Moai – and ‘fin’.

Lavachery’s narrative has much in common with recent archaeological studies, such as the work of American archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg. Van Tilburg dismisses the Western originating Darwinian-esque myth that the Rapa Nui’s own decadence caused their economic collapse and therefore cultural self-destruction, casting the story as a red herring, a distraction from acknowledgment of the role European contact had in Rapa Nui’s decline (1994: 164). Sadly, the same year as the film was released the island of Rapa Nui, owned at that time by the Compania Explotadora de la Isla de Pascua (Williamson and Balfour Company) was granted National Park Status, and what was left of the approximately 450 members of the Rapa Nui community were rounded up by the Chilean authorities and largely confined within the walls of the Hanga Roa mission. As audience members we are left to make sense of what we see for ourselves – the filmmakers refusing to do our thinking for us. Tellingly however, the continuously ambivalent soundtrack in no way suggests that this story ends happily.

The filmmakers’ collective calling attention to Rapa Nui destitution and their decision to cast the Moai removal as morally ambiguous is striking – and it is this rhetorical positioning most of all that takes L’Île de Pâques beyond the science- and-spectacle tropes of earlier archaeological newsreels, lecture films, and home- movies to become a fully-fledged documentary. Despite the reference to doting Belgian girls which feels almost humorous, and the statements about the Chilean Government’s permission in removing the statue and Rapa Nui assent, the film’s overall tone still feels apologist. This view does not mesh with stereotypical 1920s and 1930s attitudes toward collecting antiquities, especially on the heels of so many newsreels that celebrated the removal of archaeological ‘treasures’ (such as in First Peeps). At the risk of twenty-first-century anachronism, it almost seems that this final segment is deliberately intended to provoke at least critical reflection among audiences. Although the film makes no mention of the history of slavery experienced by the Rapa Nui, the reference to maritime kidnapping and being made prisoner in another land suggests deliberate parallels to the Rapa Nui past. In the 1860s Peruvian slave traders abducted half the Rapa Nui population of approximately 3000, which when combined with the effects of smallpox and tuberculosis, reduced the population by 1877 to 111 (Sinoto and Aramata 2016: 197). During his time on the island Lavachery and the expedition team came into

162 Chapter 4 contact with the aftermath of this history first hand. So again, it is worth reminding ourselves that the film’s narrative – and the argument structuring it – is entirely delivered by Lavachery’s script. The music and the commentary could just have easily accompanied an entirely different narrative about the events shown. Yet it is this story, out of all the possible stories (or lecture films, or home-movies), that Lavachery and Storck chose to tell.

Regrettably however it seems L’Île de Pâques never made an impression on the international archaeological community, let alone on the archaeology of Rapa Nui. Despite having captured on film how a Moai could be moved by man- (and woman and child) -power, and despite archaeologists’ familiarity with the 1935 Belgian expedition and publications about it, archaeologists somehow have either remained ignorant of this film or dismissed its scholastic value, and so continued to regard as a mystery how feats such as moving a Moai could be accomplished. Admittedly the methods used to move the Moai are not indicative of the original Rapa Nui techniques (contrary to Lavachery’s claim in the film that that this was the method the ancient Rapa Nui used, as the film shows the French sailors using modern equipment such as metal chains to move the Moai) but it does nevertheless demonstrate the size of crew and surprising speed at which a Moai can be manually moved. But it was not until Thor Heyerdahl attempted a similar experiment to move a Moai in 1955 (1957), then again in 1986, followed by later attempts by Pavel (in 1995), Van Tilburg and Ralston (in 2005), John Love (in 2000), and also Lipo, Hunt and Rapu Haoa (in 2011), that archaeologists began to scientifically test Moai transportation (see Bahn and Flenley 1992; Lipo et al. 2012). 24 Yet, until this thesis, few archaeologists appear to be familiar with Storck and Lavachery’s film. The only references to the film I have identified in the archaeological literature are two passing mentions in the Rapa Nui Journal: in a review of a 1989 museum exhibition in Brussels where the 1935 film was shown (Fischer 1990: 26); and another in a book review of a diary and photography- based account of the 1935 expedition, authored by Lavachery’s son Thomas (Bahn 1998: 58). However, both mentions are fleeting, stating the film is 20-22 minutes long (not the correct 23 minutes 12 seconds), and do not mention Henri Storck’s role in the film at all. This suggests that even if the film was seen by the authors, and potentially multiple copies exist and might be held by museums,

24 Ironically some of these later attempts were also made into television documentaries, including: Easter Island – A Mystery is Solved (Bengt and Heyerdahl 1987); Mega Movers: Ancient History Moves (2007) and Mystery of Easter Island (2012).

163 Chapter 4 that perhaps little thought was given to it beyond it’s novelty. There was also a 2004 screening of the film and discussion at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C., involving Jo Anne Van Tilburg and Thomas Lavachery, but again, this does not appear to have led to further scholarly critique (Van Tilburg 2009b).

Despite its failure to make an impact on an archaeological audience, L’Île de Pâques still epitomizes the documentary movement of the 1930s. It is part avant- garde experiment, and part realist and socialist critique. It functioned as an act of propaganda (vis à vis its commissioning and funding via the Belgian government), yet it was fiercely critical of both colonialism and the failure of the nation state (Chile) to take care of its residents (the Rapa Nui). Storck uses cinematic techniques to present the surreality of reality, deliberately seeking to unsettle the audience and question the status quo. The fact that Lavachery not only collaborated on the film’s production by co-authoring the script but was so influenced by this collaboration that he replicated elements of the film’s social critique in his 1936 Antiquity article is also remarkable. Thus, with the first archaeology documentary we see how the documentary form did not merely report archaeological facts as a form of scientific recording, nor did it aim to lecture or educate. Instead it was made with the intention to use poetic storytelling to situate, critique, and make relevant archaeology in modern society.

4.4.7 1930s–1940s: Archaeology’s budding filmmakers

Archaeologists and filmmakers interested in archaeology continued to film excavations and laboratory work in a range of non-fiction formats from the 1930s onwards: as newsreels, lecture films, and now propaganda, although the Second World War and its aftermath slowed the pace of production. Archaeologists filmed (or invited others to film) their archaeological work as amateur productions, usually on 16-mm film, with much of the surviving footage left unedited. Notable among these archaeological filmmakers were Richard Pittioni (1936); Agatha Christie (on Mallowan’s excavations, see Stern 2001; Trümpler 2001; 2008), Gerald Lankester Harding (see Thornton 2016a; 2016b), Reginald Campbell Thompson (Thornton and McClusky 2016), Dorothy Garrod, and more (see Stern 2007; Price 2007: 177).25 Although not an archaeologist, Jacques-Yves Cousteau also made significant contributions towards both documentary filmmaking and

25 See Filming Antiquity (2019) for an ever-growing list of early archaeology films.

164 Chapter 4 the nascent sub-discipline of maritime archaeology in the 1940s, through his early underwater films documenting shipwrecks and salvage dives.26 Altogether these pioneers filmed a wide range of archaeological projects in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, France, and the Red and Mediterranean Seas, capturing ethnographic and procedural subject matter. No doubt as more films are re- discovered and digitised more and earlier productions of these kinds will continue to surface. Yet although they are all worthy works in their own right, none of the above mentioned excavation, procedural, or ethnographic films made by archaeologists adequately meet Nichols’ criteria for documentary status.

Archaeology’s success on screen was such that by the mid-1940s British archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes was inspired to spend the better part of a year scripting and co-producing the educational film The Beginning of History (1946), funded by and in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Crown Film Unit. Although copies of her film are hard to come by, it has been described in detail by Hawkes’ own account (1946), and by her biographer Christine Finn, who highlights how Hawkes co-created what may have been the first helicopter cinematography of an archaeological site (at Skara Brae), and the first filming of a full-scale archaeological replica (of the Little Woodbury Iron Age, at Pine Wood Studios, see Finn 2000). But Hawkes never considered her film a documentary, instead categorising it as an educational film (1946). Likewise, in the U.S., eleven archaeological films made during the 1950s and reviewed by Casper Kraemer for the ‘Committee of Film and Television, Archaeological Institute of America”, are defined and valued as “educational, propaganda, promotion” of archaeology, rather than as documentary films (1958: 262). Without access to view these films myself I have refrained from categorising them as documentary or not. It seems however, that there was a lull in archaeology documentary production following L’Île de Pâques, and it was not until the 1950 documentary film Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl that archaeology documentary filmmaking again found a public audience, and made a phenomenal impact.

26 Cousteau’s shipwreck documentaries Par dix-huit mètres de fond (18 metres deep, 1942) and Épaves (Shipwrecks, 1943) not only earned him awards at documentary film festivals but drew support for his early expeditions. He also reused his footage of shipwrecks from his early films to make parts of The Silent World (1952), with which he earned a Palmes d’Or at Cannes film festival. The Silent World was purportedly the only documentary to win a Palmes d’Or until Michael Moore’s 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11.

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4.5 Concluding thoughts

In this chapter I have sought to explore and reframe how we understand the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. I have done this by applying Nichols’ criteria for documentary status to films as a means of reassessing how we define and evaluate them as archaeology documentaries. Using these criteria as a guideline, I have charted an early history of archaeology in non-fiction filmmaking, from the earliest actualitès in 1897 through to the arrival of a legitimate archaeology documentary film in 1935 – co-authored by an archaeologist no less. The next chapter considers how archaeology conquered the cinema screen in the 1950s, transitioned into factual TV, and most recently, into digital platforms in the twenty first century.

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Chapter 5 Off the historical record II: archaeology and documentary filmmaking between the 1950s and 2010s

You see, I do not want to bore you with fact-fact-fact-fact. I am responsible not towards fact, but I am responsible in the face of poetry. But of course, here in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, there are of course strictures. You cannot explain things that are completely false, so I just try to evoke some sort of spiritual parallel story within us […] not just facts, but something that illuminates you.

Werner Herzog, interviewed by Jason Solomons, Picture House Q & A, 2010.

5.1 Introduction

This chapter continues the historical overview of the archaeology documentary, as begun in Chapter Four (therefore please see section 4.1 for a discussion of historical sources, definitions, and scoping). Given the ongoing dynamism and variety of the documentary genre since it took form in the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter necessarily spans a longer chronology than the preceding chapter, and takes into its purview a wider range of filmic media including cinema, television, and digital platforms. Again, Nichols’ four-part criteria provides a reliable framework against which to assess the documentary status and effectiveness of the productions assessed here as archaeology documentaries. As in Chapter Four, this historical survey seeks to provide a way for archaeologists to better define and understand archaeology’s place in documentary, and documentary’s place in archaeology.

5.2 Chapter outline

Chapter Five is organised into three parts: the first part considers not only how archaeology documentary arose to prominence in the 1950s as a global media sensation in Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1950), but how the documentary film form was expertly capitalized upon by its author as part of a media strategy to pursue a specifically archaeological agenda. The second part examines

167 Chapter 5 archaeology’s uptake by television, its transformation into ‘factual TV’ programming, and the impact of this on archaeology’s relationship to the documentary film genre. A cross-section of British television programmes are discussed from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (AVM, 1952 - 1960) through to Digging for Britain (2010 – current). This historical account ends by considering how archaeology documentary now operates in the digital cross-platform landscape of the twenty-first-century, taking as a final case study the crowd- funded and digitally distributed Saving Mes Aynak (2014). Once more, questions of how we should define the archaeology documentary, the changing nature of archaeologists’ agency in the media, and the “invisibility” of the documentary genre and the archaeological authorship within it, rises to the surface.

5.3 The Kon-Tiki expedition

The documentary film Kon-Tiki (1950) 1 is commonly viewed as a maritime adventure story about how a crew of Scandinavian men sought to build and sail a raft from Peru to Polynesia, purely to prove that such a journey was possible. Led by Thor Heyerdahl, the amateur sailing crew sailed through storms, encountered all manner of sea life, learned to subsist from fishing and rainwater, and conducted survivalist experiments. After 101 days at sea and having crossed 6,900 km of open ocean the Kon-Tiki expedition became ship wrecked on the Raroia atoll in French Polynesia: mission accomplished. On its surface Kon-Tiki appears to be a iconic story celebrating high sea adventure, intellectual archaeological exploration, and the endurance of the human spirit (Still 5.1). Heyerdahl is widely honoured as a national folk hero in Norway, has received international honours for the Kon-Tiki expedition, and his research is often cited in archaeological publications. Yet Kon-Tiki is far more than this simplistic narrative, and Heyerdahl is anything but a typical archaeologist.

1 I based my study on the English language version of the theatrical film released in 1950.

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Still 5.1: The image of the raft as captured in the film, bearing the Kon-Tiki motif in the centre of its sail, has since become culturally iconic [Source: NRK, 1950].

A closer reading shows Kon-Tiki to be a highly personal account of how Heyerdahl set out to prove his theory that a superior white race had migrated from South America to Easter Island (as he called it), bringing with them architectural, linguistic, and botanical knowledge that would form the basis of Polynesian civilisation. This theory was not only scientifically flawed but profoundly racist and politically loaded, and it has left an enduring and problematic legacy for both archaeology as a discipline and for Polynesians. Given the expansive and enduring legacy of the Kon-Tiki brand, and its role as a key component of Heyerdahl’s research funding and media strategy, I argue that the Kon-Tiki documentary has proved to be the most successful archaeology documentary films of the twentieth century – a worrying distinction given its explicitly racist, colonial, and anti-intellectual premise.

Heyerdahl has himself written in popular, academic, and auto-biographic formats about both his archaeological and filmmaking work, but he repeatedly proves to be something of an unreliable narrator. It is fortunate then, that for our purposes his body of work has attracted much scholarly attention. Archaeological tributes and critiques abound and are considered below, with particular regard to the research completed by Graham Holton (2004). There is less study of Heyerdahl’s cinematic achievements, but two incisive accounts of Kon-Tiki’s production are

169 Chapter 5 provided by film historian Malin Wahlberg and biographer Axel Andersson2, each translating and using respectively either interviews with production crew members or Heyerdahl’s private archive as primary evidence. Theatre and Performance scholar Scott Magelssen (2016) also provides crucial insight to the Kon-Tiki legacy via a critique of the Kon-Tiki Museum and interview with curator Reidar Solsvik. As for the other films discussed in this thesis, my focus here is to bring the two fields of archaeology and filmmaking together in my study of Kon- Tiki, to consider both the film’s status as a documentary, and its subsequent significance to archaeology.

5.3.1 Thor Heyerdahl, Olle Nordemar, and Kon-Tiki

Determining the authorship of Kon-Tiki is tricky. Like L’Île de Pâques, the Kon-Tiki documentary was the product of a collaboration between an archaeologist, Thor Heyerdahl, and a filmmaker, Olle Nordemar.3 Unhelpfully, the film’s opening credits list Heyerdahl as ‘narrator’ and Nordemar as ‘editor’ – no writer, director or producer is specified (Still 5.2). Ascertaining the nature of their shared authorship and the motives underlying it deserves scrutiny given the controversial and enduring implications of Heyerdahl’s archaeological thesis as promoted by the film. The film was a critical and commercial success earning over 30 prizes and awards (see still 5.2), most famously an Oscar for Best Documentary in 1951 (stills 5.3).

Still 5.2: Heyerdahl receives top billing in Kon-Tiki’s opening titles [Source: NRK, 1950].

2 Andersson’s incisive study is based on his Ph.D “On the Origins of the Kon-Tiki Expedition and its Abiding Importance in Popular Imagination”, European University Institute, Florence. 3 Sometimes spelled Nordeman. For consistency, I have adopted the spelling used in the film’s credits.

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Still 5.3: Queues extending out the door at the American premier of Kon-Tiki, 1950 [Source: Kon-Tiki Museum Website (Reproduced with permission of the Kon-Tiki Museum © 2019)].

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Still 5.4: The Kon-Tiki Academy Award as a signifier of authorship: (top) the statuette is addressed to both Heyerdahl and Nordemar, and is on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum [Source: Kon-Tiki Museum Website (Reproduced with permission of the Kon-Tiki Museum © 2019)]. (Bottom) Nordemar receiving the award via the mail in 1951. Note also the film poster in the background crediting both Heyerdahl and Nordemar [Source: Wikimedia Commons (Courtesy Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, PDM)].

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The award inscription reads:

Academy First Award

To

“Kon-Tiki”

Best Documentary Feature of 1951

Thor Heyerdahl Leader of Expedition

An Artfilm Production, RKO, Radio Rellings

Olle Nordemar, Producer

Film Presented by Sol Lesser

However, such industry prizes only confound determinations of authorship. Both Heyerdahl and Nordemar were named recipients of the Oscar award, Heyerdahl as expedition leader and Nordemar as producer (see stills 5.4 showing statuette). However, in his auto-biography Heyerdahl misleadingly implies that he and Nordemar received two separate documentary Oscar awards, one for producer and one for cameraman (Heyerdahl 2000: 212). In reality rather than two separate awards they likely simply received two separate statuettes for the same award. Even this, however, is further contradicted by the online Academy Awards database which credits only Nordemar for the film - a fact that would have distressed Heyerdahl given that the two ended their relationship acrimoniously due to a financial conflict (Academy Awards Database 2018; Andersson 2010: 122). Therefore, to truly comprehend the filmmaking context of Kon-Tiki – the authorship, motives, influences, and documentary credentials of the film – we must turn to inspect its origins and production.

Heyerdahl used film to document the entirety of Kon-Tiki expedition: not only the maritime component but also filming months of travel, preparations, and ship building in Peru and Ecuador. According to Heyerdahl he bought a 16-mm camera in Oslo (shown in still 5.5), and a generous provision of black and white film stocks for the expedition, as well as processing equipment for checking the quality of reels (although as Heyerdahl conflates photographic and cinematographic recording in his written account of the voyage it is unknown if this was suitable for film processing, and the crew appear not to have brought

173 Chapter 5 any projection equipment with them; e.g. Heyerdahl 1951: 49, 71, 74, 187; 2000: 155). Although Heyerdahl later presents his acquiring of filmmaking equipment as an independent decision, bought from a shop, his letters indicate that the film camera and 62 rolls of film stock were actually supplied at his request from the US Pentagon and Army Signal corps (the role of the military in the Kon-Tiki project will be discussed further below; Andersson 2010: 113). Colour film stocks were also brought on board, but most were later found to be damaged by sea water leaving only a few minutes in-tact (Norwegian Film Institute 2011; Andersson 2010: 114). This may have occurred when the crew attempted to process stock mid-voyage using warm sea water, and had to radio a Hollywood laboratory for processing advice (Heyerdahl 1951: 150). Crew members took turns shooting when sailing conditions allowed, thus the film record features everyone aboard, although it seems Heyerdahl was in charge and was ultimately titled as script director (Manus Regi) in the film’s credits (e.g. 1950: 98).

Still 5.5: The Bell and Howell 16-mm camera used to film Kon-Tiki, on display at Kon-Tiki Museum [Source: Wikimedia Commons (Courtesy Vassia Atanassova, 2014, CC-BY-3.0)].

Yet Heyerdahl later discovered he did not have the requisite understanding of filmmaking to take Kon-Tiki from footage to feature film. As he admitted with regret in his autobiography, at the first screening of the raw 800 feet of footage for buyers, hosted at the Norwegian Embassy in New York, Heyerdahl quickly came to recognise that he had profoundly underestimated complexities of filmmaking:

“It turned out to be a veritable nightmare. I had been given twenty minutes of instruction when I bought the small wind-up camera with three changeable lenses in a photography store in Oslo before I left. We were

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now gathering for the screening and realised that over half the film was completely damaged by water, and the other half was projected in slow motion. It looked as though it had been filmed by someone swinging in a hammock on a train at slow speed, moving in and out of tunnels. The film was interspersed by blinding periods of light when one could just make out the mouth of a shark, a bearded head, a naked foot or a squirming fish. One after the other, the onlookers silently tiptoed from the room, and the hours passed. In the end I was left alone with a single buyer form the RKO film company, who offered two hundred dollars for the lot, in the hope of being able to splice the usable parts into a ten-minute news reel. No deal was made.” (Heyerdahl 2000: 210).4

For a period, there was a possibility that the expedition footage might be adapted by contacts of fellow crew-member Knut Haugland into a sort of bio-pic docu- drama, but this plan, too, failed to attract financing (Andersson 2010: 115-6). According to his autobiography Heyerdahl instead settled for turning the footage into a silent lecture film, borrowing a splicing machine from a friend and hastily cutting the reels himself in his bedroom in New York (2000: 210). He then presented the edited footage at the Explorers Club in New York where the material was better received (although oddly he states that when watching the film play at the screening he was surprised by the amount of missing footage – suggesting perhaps his friend actually did this editing as well (Heyerdahl 2000: 211). Off the back of this screening he signed a contract with a lecture tour agent and spent the following months lecturing across the USA, Canada, and Europe (Heyerdahl 2000: 211).

In 1949 in Stockholm, Heyerdahl’s lecture and screening attracted the interest of Swedish producer Olle Nordemar who saw the commercial potential in the footage which he felt had “a real and fresh feel” – he quickly acquired it for the production company Artfilm AB (Andersson 2010: 117; Wahlberg 2013: 144). 5 Previously, via his military contacts, Nordemar had arranged for the import from the USA to Sweden of an optical printer, possibly the first in Europe (Andersson

4 Heyerdahl’s memoir again conflicts with Andersson’s study, citing Heyerdahl’s own correspondence in which US $100 was the sum offered (2010: 115). 5 In his memoir, Heyerdahl claims it was former Swedish prince Lennart Bernadotte, not Nordemar, who attended the lecture and reformatted the film, and minimises Nordemar’s role (2000: 211-12). Yet this contradicts both film credits and archival records, and no Lennart Berndotte is linked to the film otherwise, suggesting either a mistake or omission on Heyerdahl’s part. Given the purported animosity between the two, the latter is suspected.

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2010: 117; Wahlberg 2013: 145). In 1947 Artfilm had acquired the printer from the Swedish Army, and now used it to copy and upgrade Heyerdahl’s film from 16-mm to 35-mm – from amateur to professional quality. To complement the expedition footage Artfilm producer Lennart Erenborg also filmed a lecture sequence featuring Heyerdahl in Sandrews studio (Wahlberg 2013: 146). This was edited together with Heyerdahl’s footage to create a professional quality commercial documentary feature film, topped off with evocative sound design, a full musical score (performed by Prague’s Film Symphony Orchestra), and Norwegian and English introductions and commentary (shot and edited separately). Finally, after years of work, Heyerdahl’s documentary feature film was complete.

Andersson firmly positions producer Olle Nordemar as the creative intellect behind Kon-Tiki, citing as evidence the film’s combat-report realism and use of a cinematic language rooted in war-propaganda – attributable to Nordemar due to his background working for the US Office of War Information during 1945 (2010: 117; Wahlberg 2013: 145). Wahlberg also attributes the film to Nordemar on the same grounds, who she credits for the film’s sense of realism and authenticity due to Nordemar’s background in wildlife photography, amateur filmmaking, and (again) war propaganda (2013: 147). Indeed, it was Nordemar ’s editing, interview filming, and his efforts as a producer that not only made Kon-Tiki possible but also made it a cinematic and commercial success. However, Nordemar’s on- screen expression of any authorial voice pales in comparison to Heyerdahl’s distinctively personal narration and unique rhetorical address and aims.

Wahlberg speculates that Heyerdahl believed that without visual evidence of the voyage the Kon-Tiki experiment would have lacked credibility (2013: 143; Bazin makes the same assessment 1967: 160). Attaining credibility was essential for Heyerdahl to fulfil his goals of convincing both public and academic audiences of his thesis, which seems to underpin every single image, word, and event in the film. Before considering the film closely however, let us familiarise ourselves with Heyerdahl’s archaeological theory and its reception.

Heyerdahl contended that humans had migrated in one direction from South America (Peru) to Rapa Nui, and the Pacific beyond (Heyerdahl 1951; 1957). Contrary to Heyerdahl’s claims, this was not in itself an original theory, having been suggested by Spanish missionary Father Joacquin de Zeñiga as early as 1803 (Bahn and Flenley 1992: 38; Holton 2004: 165), and opposed by scholars such as Lavachery (as explained in L’Île de Pâques, 1935). Additionally Captain John C.

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Voss had already proved pan-Pacific contact was possible by traversing via canoe from Vancouver to Polynesia in 1901 (Andersson 2010: 31). But Heyerdahl’s contribution took the earlier versions of the migration theory a step further by asserting that this was a racially defined migration of light skinned, fair headed (red or blond), long bearded Caucasians led by the historical figure of Tiki (Heyerdahl 1950; 1957). According to Heyerdahl, these ancient architects were the originators of the technology and wisdom of the ancient civilisations of South Americans, such as the Incas, but who were forced by an ancient conflict to migrate across the sea – led by the legendary red-bearded “Kon-Tiki” – bringing their knowledge with them to Polynesia, spanning Rapa Nui to Samoa to New Zealand (Heyerdahl 1951: 19, 20).6 Eventually and mysteriously Kon-Tiki’s people would vanish from history. Heyerdahl asserted that it was this white race who were responsible for the archaeological monuments in the Pacific, most famously the Moai on Rapa Nui. Later, he also contended that this white race had originally come to the Americas from the Middle East (Heyerdahl 1957). As evidence for his theory Heyerdahl cited cultural, architectural, linguistic, racial, and botanical similarities between South American and Polynesian societies (1957).

Heyerdahl had previously attempted to publish his racial migration theory in full as a monograph, in academic journals, and to present it at academic forums – but had been repeatedly met with scepticism by archaeologists, anthropologists, oceanographers, and even sailors (Heyerdahl 1951: 2, 22-5; 1957: 601). It was this decade-long period of disinterest, which Heyerdahl took as unjust rejection, that spurred him to propose the idea of building a balsa-wood raft in the style of Peruvian and Ecuadorian rafts, and sail it across the Pacific himself, primarily to show that such a voyage was possible but also simply and publicly to prove his academic naysayers wrong (Heyerdahl 1951: 25). Kon-Tiki documents this entire saga: not only the maritime journey, but Heyerdahl’s personal account of his struggle against academia.

In structure and content the film faithfully recreates the account Heyerdahl had already penned for both news articles and his popular book – even in the jokes and humorous asides from the book make it into the film’s spoken narration.7 For

6 Initially Heyerdahl asserted there had been two separate one-directional migrations to Polynesia, first from Peru during the Neolithic then from British Columbia in 1000AD. By the time of the expedition and the film’s release he amended his theory to a single one- way migration from Peru to Polynesia (Heyerdahl 1941: 18, cited in Magelssen 2016: 32). 7 According to Andersson (2010: 56), the book’s narrative, in turn, was also little changed from Heyerdahl’s earlier newspaper reports relayed during the expedition.

177 Chapter 5 these reasons, and acknowledging that Nordemar was the talent who translated Heyerdahl’s story to screen, I contend that Heyerdahl is the true author, intellectually and creatively, responsible for the Kon-Tiki documentary. It is Heyerdahl’s unique perspective and authorial voice that direct the film, a fact that becomes particularly evident through examining the expression in Kon-Tiki of rhetorical address, indexical documentation, poetic experimentation, and narrative storytelling.

5.3.2 Kon-Tiki as a documentary film

Heyerdahl and Nordemar deploy all four of Nichols’ criteria in Kon-Tiki in order to persuade audiences to believe Heyerdahl’s archaeological thesis. In fact, so deftly woven together are the elements of indexical documentation, narrative storytelling, poetic experimentation, and rhetorical address that it is difficult to differentiate where argument ends and storytelling begins.

Indeed the amateur quality of the cinematography of Kon-Tiki - captured as it was from all possible angles and perspectives including inside and outside the raft’s hut, from the birds' eye view of the mast, and back towards the raft from a rubber dingy – is so varied that it does indeed feel comprehensive, immersive, and authentically real. So affecting is the realism of Kon-Tiki that according to The Times and the Observer film reviews cinema audiences reportedly experienced seasickness from the constant rolling of the camera with the waves (Heyerdahl 2000: 211; Andersson 2010: 125). Later, esteemed film critic and theorist André Bazin praised the realism in the film, particularly the “danger” suggested by encounters with a whale shark, putting Kon-Tiki in the same category as Flaherty’s filmmaking, but superior to him due to Flaherty’s penchant for falsifying scenes. Bazin ultimately deemed Kon-Tiki to be “inscription chiselled deep” (1967: 162). Even the gaps and omissions in Kon-Tiki, such as the lack of coverage of storms, was read by Bazin as a sign of the film’s truthfulness (Bazin suggested that it was too dangerous to film these moments, see 1967: 162), rather than the more mundane fact that such footage was very likely simply among that which proved too damaged or poorly shot to use (as suggested by Andersson 2010: 124). That this was a reason for the gaps in coverage was confirmed by Heyerdahl in his autobiography, when he realised after the first round of editing and the first screening of the lecture film version, that “…the most dramatic parts of the film had ended up in the bin…” (2000: 211). On closer inspection one can also see how Nordemar used avant-garde editing techniques

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(in other words, poetic experimentation) to plug the gaps in Heyerdahl’s coverage by recycling footage of whales, sharks, and views of the raft by reversing, mirroring, freeze framing and repeating shots to create the sense that the raft was at the mercy of entire packs of predatory sea life. For example, in one montage sequence one killer whale is presented as three separate whales, the repetition identifiable by two distinct scratches on its flank, as well as the reflection on its blowhole, and the wake effect (Stills 5.6). Evidently Nordemar and Heyerdahl had more in common with Flaherty’s taking of artistic licenses than Bazin and other reviewers realised.

Still 5.6: Spot the difference: “three” of the killer whales featured in Kon-Tiki, yet all have the exact same scars (see below dorsal fin and above tail), wake effects, and framing [Source: NRK, 1950].

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Some scholars have positioned the indexicality in Kon-Tiki as being influenced in style by WWII combat films and propaganda, following Nordemar’s background in war propaganda and Heyerdahl’s use of the high-quality but lightweight 16-mm camera (Andersson 2010; Wahlberg 2013: 145). However, this feels like an overreach as Heyerdahl had never undertaken combat filmmaking before, and was unfamiliar with military cinematography, and the mere origins of a type of camera do not automatically endow it with genre specific conventions (especially when wielded by a novice). Certainly Nordemar’s approach to editing aligned the film with military interests (discussed below), but I contend military influences had more to do with production planning and financial investments and public relations, rather than any cinematic experiments with post-war realist aesthetics introduced by Nordemar. Given that at this time 16-mm cameras were also beginning to gain popularity among both documentary and amateur filmmakers (Aufderheide 2007: 45), I suggest it is within the techniques and conventions of the documentary genre that the indexicality of the film is more appropriately understood.

The best demonstration of Heyerdahl and Nordemar’s successful use of documentary techniques to persuade audiences of Heyerdahl’s archaeological thesis are the parts of the film in which the Kon-Tiki crew perform Heyerdahl’s theory for the camera – thus making it more believable to audiences than any lecture, photograph, or text ever could. For instance, during the expedition launch ceremony in Callao Heyerdahl gives the following commentary:

“After thanking the Peruvian License Officer, the raft was christened “Kon- Tiki”, with the milk of a coconut. The expedition secretary, Miss Woldt is rewarded with sunflowers as the raft was named Kon-Tiki in honour of the sun-god of ancient Peru. Incan mythology is full of references to a white and bearded priest king: Con Tiki Viracocha. His head is carved on prehistoric stone statues, and one of these served as model for the head which Hesselberg painted on our sail. The last we are told about Kon-Tiki is that he was driven out of his old kingdom, disappearing to the west across the Pacific. Out on the Pacific Islands the natives too speak of Tiki, who brought their ancestors first out to the islands. It was in his trail we should follow with our raft.”

As Heyerdahl narrates the above script the images show not only Woldt receiving her symbolic sunflowers, but the raising of Kon-Tiki’s mast with the Kon-Tiki motif emblazoned upon it, before cutting directly to Heyerdahl upon discussion

180 Chapter 5 of Con Tiki Viracocha. When we are told through narration about ‘Kon-Tiki’ being driven west across the ocean, we are shown Heyerdahl, waving and smiling farewell directly to the camera, followed by imagery of the motif again – the correlation is explicit (Still 5.7). By enacting the racial migration thesis, Heyerdahl’s theory is put into practice and made real: Heyerdahl adopts the role of Kon-Tiki, and the white crew stand in for his ancient architects of civilisation.

Still 5.7: Heyerdahl cast as Con Tiki Viracocha. (Left) Heyerdahl waves farewell as (right) the Kon-Tiki mast and its motif are raised, ready to launch [Source: NRK, 1950].

At the end of the film, after all the adventures at sea, Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki analogy is turned into reality. After shipwrecking on an uninhabited Polynesian island and salvaging cargo from the ship, the crew plant a coconut on their landing site whilst Heyerdahl narrates that such cultivated coconuts found in Polynesia were originally brought by Kon-Tiki from Peru. Even the camerawork supports his argument by gently tilting upward to direct our gaze from the men on the beach to the swaying coconut trees behind – thus both in performance and cinematography Heyerdahl’s thesis is enacted (Still 5.8).8

8 Later research has confirmed that coconuts have an Indo-Pacific origin, not South American.

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Still 5.8: The Kon-Tiki crew planting a coconut on their landing site, performatively fulfilling the Kon-Tiki thesis [Source: NRK, 1950].9

When Polynesians from Raroia arrive, they are first mocked in Heyerdahl’s commentary for wearing “European underwear” (an observation intended in jest, but which feels deeply hypocritical given the state of undress of the Scandinavian crew). As such the Raroians are presented impurely native, corrupted by European influence. The Raroians are then described in Heyerdahl’s commentary as unworldly and easily awed by the Kon-Tiki radio through which the crew play Hula music for them. After this the Raroians are depicted inspecting the Kon-Tiki raft, while Heyerdahl narrates how this act confirmed his theory:

“But what most interested the natives was to find out what kind of vessel it was that had carried us alive through the breakers on the windward side of the reef. When they waded out and sighted Kon-Tiki they got very excited and shouted that this was no boat at all, it was a pae-pae. The chief who knew some French explained that pae-pae was the name of a sort of vessel which was used by their early forefathers at sea. Such pae- paes, or rogno-rongo, were described in many of the early legends, preserved in their songs. The oldest among the natives had many interesting traditions to relate. And even knew a song about Maui, a relative of Tiki, which stated that he came from the direction of the rising

9 Attempts made by the researcher to identify and contact a Raroian representative organisation to discuss the use of the images made on Raroia were unsuccessful. If you are a Raroia community member and have questions or concerns about the use of these images (stills 5.8-5.12) in this thesis, please contact the author.

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sun, just like us. Natives gave us a glorious welcome, and we in turn presented them with everything we could spare.”

The Raroian men are show carrying objects off the raft and back to shore. Then Heyerdahl repeats the performance of bringing and planting cultivated plants to Polynesia, before seemingly lecturing the Polynesians about their racial origins, and the origins of their farming practices – all in front of a Norwegian flag planted in the sand (see stills 5.9) (in fact the presence of Western flags planted in the sand are ubiquitous throughout the concluding segment of the film). Heyerdahl describes the scene as follows:

“Here we planted the cultivated plants which we had carried with us across the sea just as their own forefathers had done it fifteen hundred years ago. I had just presented to the chief Tupuhoe, a gourd, one of the crop plants which were common to these islanders and the Indians of Peru, long before the arrival of Europeans.”

Stills 5.9: The Kon-Tiki crew performing Heyerdahl’s thesis: (top) Heyerdahl and Tupuhoe plant Peruvian plants together; (bottom left) Heyerdahl explains the gourd to the Polynesians; (bottom right) the Norwegian flag looms over the proceedings [Source: NRK, 1950].

But not only do these white men purportedly bring the Raroians historic and agricultural knowledge, they also bring healing wisdom. In one scene, the crew

183 Chapter 5 use the radio to contact a surgeon in Los Angeles to direct Heyerdahl – wearing a woven Polynesian crown no less – to perform an operation on a boy with an abscess on his head, and claim that this saved his life (see still 5.10) (in the book the boy is named as Huamata, and Heyerdahl claims the crew then acted as doctors to the entire village until their first aid supplies ran out).

Still 5.10: Heyerdahl, wearing a woven crown, operates on Huamata [Source: NRK, 1950].

These acts of benevolence – the gifts, the plants, the medical surgery (while dressed as a crowned elite) – were no doubt envisioned by Heyerdahl to be genuinely well meaning, but they reveal something more than mere kind-hearted paternalism. Each act is carefully performed and staged for filming so that, again, the crew enact Heyerdahl’s theory by acting as the bringers of a superior civilization – as much for the camera and its future audience as for the Polynesians. As Andersson states:

“[w]here Heyerdahl proved innovative was not in the articulation of his theory, which originated in nineteenth-century racist discourse, but in his idea that his theory needed to be performed in order to be proved. The performativity of the Kon-Tiki expedition, down to such details as the crew growing beards like the white race, carried the diffusionist idea out of its abstract state and dramatized it through play.” (Andersson 2010: 158).

Andersson also observes that by casting the Scandinavian crew as superior primitives Heyerdahl ultimately not only reduces Polynesians to being uninventive and unnecessary to their own history, but – in the ultimate act of colonisation of

184 Chapter 5 the past – replaces them (2010: 158).10 Even the island that the Kon-Tiki crew land on is purportedly renamed ‘Fenua Kon-Tiki’, or Kon-Tiki Island, according to Heyerdahl’s narration. In other words, as Magelssen too, so succinctly frames it: “the white guy out-Natived the Native” – a narrative trope also used in fiction films such as Tarzan (2016: 36). 11 Now, Heyerdahl is Kon-Tiki, and his white crew are the architects of civilisation.

Kon-Tiki concludes with another studio lecture by Heyerdahl, proffering a dubious qualification to his racial migration thesis by stating that although the expedition was a “success”, his theory was not necessarily scientifically proven, rather only the possibility of migration was demonstrated. However, even with this caveat, the film ultimately implies that of course his theory was proven. After the credits the audience are shown a final image to keep in their memories: the mascot of Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory, the red-bearded Kon-Tiki motif (still 5.11).

Still 5.11: The ubiquitous, bearded, Kon-Tiki motif is the final image the audience are shown – the symbol of Heyerdahl’s thesis [Source: NRK, 1950].

There is one more observation to be made regarding the role of documentary filmmaking in service of Heyerdahl’s thesis. In the end, visual indexicality (or photographic realism) proves to be not enough. At no point can any of above

10 In Heyerdahl’s popular account, this act of replacement is made literal: “Once more there were white and bearded chiefs among the Polynesian people on Raroia […]. [The natives] danced forward to us and transferred the crowns from their own heads to ours…” (1950: 224). According to later accounts, Heyerdahl would ask islanders to call him ‘Señor Kon-Tiki’, after his god-like character (Connard 2002). 11 Coincidentally, Tarzan was in fact one of Heyerdahl’s favourite childhood stories, and coincidently the 1940 film version was also produced by Sol Lesser (Andersson 2010: 81).

185 Chapter 5 footage of the shipwreck or interactions with Raroians be actually be verified as showing what Heyerdahl claims it shows, as the film was captured without sound. At time, awkwardly, the sound tracks betray the constructedness of the film to viewers, such as in an American Anthropology review of the film in which the reviewer observes that the waves “crash” when actually cresting (Klymyshyn 1976: 384). All of Heyerdahl’s explanations and interpretations necessarily come to the audience via Heyerdahl’s carefully scripted commentary. By watching the film in silence, the narrative could easily give a completely different account of the expedition and the Raroian response. For instance, the Raroians do not actually appear to be excited by the so-called “pae-pae”, nor are they shown speaking to Heyerdahl much at all, let alone discussing their origin myths with him. Instead they seem more interested in the tinned food, or are shown carrying the heavy cargo from the raft to shore (whether for themselves or for the Scandinavian crew cannot be ascertained visually). Likewise, the facial expressions of the sick boy and his mother seem at best ambivalent towards the brash white strangers – a response which could now be interpreted to mean anything (Still 5.12). Ultimately, taken alone, without Heyerdahl’s rhetoric and narration, the visuals actually tell us very little for sure.

Still 5.12: Huamata and his mother [name not given] after the surgery, in the final part of Kon-Tiki [Source: NRK, 1950].

5.3.3 Kon-Tiki as a media strategy

By now it is evident that Heyerdahl dedicated as much effort to the film’s design, production, and distribution as he did to the writing the popular book. The documentary film appears to have been an equally essential part of Heyerdahl’s

186 Chapter 5 wider media strategy, intended to persuade his audience of both his thesis and the merit of his work. Andersson (2010) and Wahlberg’s (2013) respective and insightful research into Kon-Tiki as a post-war media phenomenon allow us to inspect in-depth Heyerdahl’s media strategy from behind the scenes.

Like Carter before him Heyerdahl courted the media to promote his archaeological expedition – although Heyerdahls appears to have had rather more verve and enthusiasm for the task than Carter.12 Before the expedition, Heyerdahl struck exclusive press deals for coverage of the Kon-Tiki new story with media outlets: the NTB for Norwegian coverage, and the North American Newspaper Association for worldwide rights (Andersson 2010: 45). He had the Kon-Tiki crew members sign contracts agreeing to his exclusive control of media outputs, hired a literary agent for himself, and secured a book contract before leaving for the expedition (Andersson 2010: 45, 53).

Yet the Kon-Tiki expedition not only served Heyerdahl’s personal media strategy aims, but was also of interest to a diverse array of national and military organisations, including the US Pentagon, British Armed Services, United Nations, and the governments of Peru, Ecuador and Norway (for details see Andersson 2010). In supporting Kon-Tiki by providing funding, maps and charts, equipment (including film equipment as mentioned above), office space, and facilitating travel and work permissions – each of these organisations sought to capitalise on the good-news story Kon-Tiki promised the world’s war-weary public: a positive public-relations story of human co-operation, endurance, and accomplishment. However the promise of positive public relations was perhaps less important than Heyerdahl’s obligations to report back to the US and Peruvian governments data on currents, weather observations, and fish populations, which in turn would presumably be used to inform maritime territory claims (Andersson 2010). Andersson suggests that these organisations would have found affinity with Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory of a superior white race spreading over Polynesia, as the US expanded over the territories claimed from Japan, and as the white and ‘Mestizo’ elites in power in Peru expanded government claims over Indigenous and oceanic territories (2010). Thus, it becomes evident how Heyerdahl’s seemingly innocuous expedition and media strategy was itself couched in a web of national and military schemes. Fittingly, Heyerdahl’s various

12 Kon-Tiki was also not Heyerdahl’s first courting of the media: he had sold articles to the Norwegian press about his Fatu Hiva expedition, and conducted a successful lecture tour after it as well (Andersson 2010: 23).

187 Chapter 5 agreements with national and military organisations also calls to mind Grierson and Rotha’s conception of documentary filmmaking as beneficent state propaganda, designed to facilitate the idea of collective security, support nationalist systems, and as Rotha put it (somewhat ingenuously) “a world of united races and peoples” (1936: 241).

From the launch of the raft through to its arrival in French Polynesia, he kept himself busy not only with the necessary sailing, fishing, scientific recordings, and filming, but also writing news articles and making radio reports, cultivating an international audience reached via the Kon-Tiki’s on-board radio (so important were the radios that four were brought on board, in case of malfunctions – see Andersson 2010: 46; Wahlberg 2013: 143). Through his efforts, a global public were entertained and inspired by the Kon-Tiki experiment, tuning in for regular updates directly from the raft (Andersson 2010: 46). By the end of the voyage the Kon-Tiki crew had become international celebrities. After the expedition, the following year, Heyerdahl published the popular account of his theory and voyage in “The Kon-Tiki Expedition” in Norwegian in 1948. Then the film went into production, as described above.

In October 1950, after success on the arthouse festival circuit, American company Sol Lesser Productions purchased the rights to Kon-Tiki for worldwide distribution (AFI 2016). The film was carefully timed to be released to coincide with the book’s publication in English. Kon-Tiki premiered with royal patronage at the Grand Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden on 13th January 1950, followed by Norway (14th February 1950), Edinburgh (27th August 1950), the USA (1st April 1951) and other countries from 1952 onward, with Heyerdahl conducting a promotional radio and theatre tour alongside (Heyerdahl 1950: 213; Andersson 2010: 119- 21). Under producer Sol Lesser’s influence via distribution company RKO, the USA saw an impressive screening season with 200 copies of the Kon-Tiki opening at 50 theatres across the USA simultaneously, and running for a 6-month period at the premiering cinema Sutton Theatre in New York (Andersson 2010: 121). In the USA alone the film grossed US $ 3 million, surpassing fiction film average grosses and setting a world record for highest documentary box office intake (Andersson 2010: 121). The film and its paraphernalia unabashedly promoted the book such that by the end of 1951 Heyerdahl’s book had become a bestseller with over 600,000 sales internationally – a figure that passed 2 million by 1953, and

188 Chapter 5 purportedly over 50 million by 2012 (see Still 5.13 and Figure 5.1) (Andersson 2010: 70, 95; Solsvik 2012: 72).

Still 5.13: Opening intertitles from Kon-Tiki (1950) cross-promoting Heyerdahl's popular book [Source: NRK, 1950].

Figure 5.1: Kon-Tiki branding and promotions: (left) Kon-Tiki film poster promoting the book in the bottom right corner; and (right) 1953 advertisement for the British edition of the book [Source: Kon-Tiki Museum Website (Reproduced with permission of the Kon-Tiki Museum © 2019)]. Note that the Kon-Tiki motif again features prominently in both advertisements.

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There are conflicting accounts of Heyerdahl’s attempts to obtain copyright and monetize ‘Kon-Tiki’ as a brand name, to capitalize on the ‘Tiki Culture’ bar trend that played on Hawaiian and Polynesian music, design, and food. According to Andersson (2010: 71; 198) Heyerdahl never secured copyright, however the AFI records report that he, Lesser, and publisher Rand-McNally formed a company called Kon-Tiki Enterprises with the intent of merchandising lamps, bookends, and other products bearing the Kon-Tiki motif (2016). Magelssen, citing an interview with Kon-Tiki Museum curator Solsvik (2016: 44), suggests that he did gain copyright but failed to then secure any further arrangement with a Hollywood company to sell products associated with the documentary, with the goal of repaying expedition investors. It is unlikely that financial reward was Heyerdahl’s primary motive for the Kon-Tiki brand and its out-puts, but he was evidently not one to shy away when it came to the business prospects of the brand.

The film was acquired by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation for television adaptation, then via Norwegian distribution company NKR International it was licensed on to other national broadcasters such as the BBC. According to continuity notes, the 1951 English-language television version of Kon-Tiki was based on the Norwegian film, dubbed by English radio commentator Ben Grauer, who also replaced Dimbleby in a new introduction (AFI 2016). In the 1995 version this introduction was absent and Grauer’s commentary had again been replaced, this time with an unnamed English narrator. In comparison to the original 1950 film, the pacing of the 1995 television version is brisker with images and explanations trimmed, taking the documentary’s length from 101 minutes to just 58, Nordemar’s credit was changed from ‘producer’ to ‘editor’. The music soundtrack has changed from an eclectic combination of Hollywood jungle themes, orchestral compositions, and folk music to be replaced by a more restrained and formal orchestral score. The commentary remains more or less the same, albeit with paraphrasing and cuts, but the new narrator fails to replicate Heyerdahl’s authorial voice, particularly his persuasive charisma and humorous asides. The overall consequence of these changes is the various television versions focus more on the adventure narrative and less on advancing Heyerdahl’s thesis, although it is still present. With less devotion to advancing Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory the television versions of Kon-Tiki are evidently more invested in entertaining audiences with a brisk adventure story, rather than persuading them of an archaeological thesis presented in depth. Nevertheless, television took Heyerdahl’s work from cinema screening into

190 Chapter 5 homes, schools, and universities, and was likely the first archaeology documentary to cross both media forms.

Whilst in production, Heyerdahl and crew member Knut Haugland also founded the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo in 1950, where Haugland served as director of the museum for 40 years (Magelssen 2016: 37). Both Heyerdahl and the museum gained further press and prestige in the eyes of a global public by a personal visit from Queen Elizabeth, publicized internationally via the British Pathé newsreel ‘Queen Wins Norway’s Heart AKA Royal Visit to Norway’ (1955).

By the mid-1950s, after years of carefully concerted news articles, newsreels, radio reports, lecture tours, book sales, film releases, and television adaptations – Kon-Tiki had become a household name, synonymous with adventure, discovery, human endurance, post-war optimism, and a world-citizen outlook (Solsvik 2012: 72; Magelssen 2016: 27). Heyerdahl’s primitive raft had become a powerful media juggernaut, bypassing academic acceptance in pursuit of popular favour and political patronage. In its wake Heyerdahl had finally gained credibility – at least in the eyes of the public – and he had found his own way to establish himself as an expert and fund a lifelong career as a self-styled archaeologist operating beyond the limits of academic archaeology.

Heyerdahl led archaeological excavations in Galápagos in 1953, at Rapa Nui in 1955 and 1956, in the Maldives in 1983 and 1984, and in Túcume, Peru from 1988 to 1992 (Heyerdahl and Ferdon 1961, cited in Holton 2004: 167; Heyerdahl 1957; Kon-Tiki Museum 2018). He also conducted more maritime archaeological experiments to test his theory of cultural diffusion from the Middle East to Egypt, and from there on to the Americas. For instance, to prove that pyramid building technology had come to the Americas from Egypt he financed and led the Ra II sailing expedition, sailing from Morocco to Barbados in 1970 (Ra I had sunk the year prior). To prove his theories about ancient migrations from the Middle East to Egypt, he led the Tigris sailing expedition from Iraq to Djibouti in 1977-78. More recently he turned his attentions to proving a new hypothesis, similar to that of Kon-Tiki: that Odin was a real person who brought civilisation to Europe from Azerbaijan and Russia (Storfjell 2002; BBC 2001; Magelssen 2016: 28). Alongside his archaeological research, he also became an outspoken environmental and peace advocate, selecting nationally and racially diverse sailing crews, and in the case of the Tigris, burning the boat at the end of its voyage on 3rd April 1978 in protest against war and violence (The Kon-Tiki Museum 2018). Like Kon-Tiki, each of these expeditions were filmed and made

191 Chapter 5 into film or television documentaries, again with Heyerdahl at the helm as writer and sometimes also director, including Galápagos (1955), Aku-Aku 1960, and Ra (1973) (Kon-Tiki website 2018; Wahlberg 2013: 144). For his work as co-producer of The Ra Expeditions (1971), Heyerdahl was again nominated for an Academy Award (Kon-Tiki website 2018; Academy Awards Database 2018). Additionally, since 1963, the Kon-Tiki Museum and its Thor Heyerdahl Research Foundation have served as a research hub and sponsor, providing to date over £ 2 million to fund archaeological fieldwork, maritime experimental archaeology, and cultural history in the Pacific, the Maldives, and Peru (The Kon-Tiki Museum 2018).

5.3.4 Kon-Tiki’s impact on archaeology

After the successes of his popular book and documentary film, Heyerdahl was finally able to secure an academic publishing deal to release his theory in detail across a two-volume monograph, American Indians in the Pacific, the first volume of which was released in 1952. Until this point academics had largely refrained from critiquing Heyerdahl’s theory as expressed in popular book or film form – whether out of a wish to respectfully wait for his promised academic account, or out of reticence to engage at all. But now that Heyerdahl’s work was officially in the academic arena it became fair game. Given Heyerdahl’s bitter rejection of academia (he had quit university without graduating, Andersson 2010: 3), his open anti-intellectualism, and his routine dismissal of others’ scholarship, academic reviews of his work in return were comparatively tame. It is outside the parameters of this thesis to examine in detail the scientific elements of Heyerdahl’s research, which in any case, far better-informed archaeologists and anthropologists than I have already unpicked and disproven – suffice to say that few in the 1950s were convinced by his arguments. The most common criticisms levelled at Heyerdahl was his cherry picking of superficially similar instances of folk lore, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, and botanical evidence between Peru and the Pacific, all presented in excessive quantity, but without due context or critical analysis, and with significant omissions and contradictions (Heine-Geldern 1950; Ekholm 1954; Linton 1954; Bushnell 1961; Bellwood 1978: 19, 129; Bahn and Flenley 1992; Van Tilburg 1994: 131). But it was anthropologist Edward Norbeck who highlighted the difference between academic credibility and rhetorical persuasion:

“Every straw is seized, bent, and twisted to suit the author’s purposes. Tenuous evidence is pushed beyond reasonable limits; conflicting data

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are given scant attention or omitted, and the manuscript abounds with incautious statements. The author [Heyerdahl] is both ingenious and ingenuous, and verbal magic is a recurrently used tool.” (1953: 93).

More pointedly, scholars challenged the scientific validity of the Kon-Tiki expedition on the grounds that the raft was towed out to sea using a modern tug boat to avoid the pull of coastal currents which would have sent such a raft far northward; that the winds and currents needed for Kon-Tiki’s drifting westward do in fact change direction seasonally; and that Peruvian rafts never had sails until the arrival of the Spanish, rendering the Kon-Tiki “replica” a fake (Suggs 1968, cited in Holton 2004: 166; Holmes 1958: 131; Bahn and Flenley 1992: 46- 7). More recently, Peter Bellwood diplomatically dismissed Heyerdahl’s ‘Caucasian’ racial migration theory, (1987: 20, 128), and Paul Bahn and John Flenley dedicate an entire chapter in their book to contest it, arguing “…Kon-Tiki showed nothing more than that, by using a post-European-contact kind of sail-raft and modern survival equipment, it is possible to survive a 101-day voyage between Peru and Polynesia,” (1992: 46, 50). Thus, where documentary filmmaking had effectively served Heyerdahl’s goal of persuading a public audience to accept his thesis, his academic text, which by its nature was exposed to closer scrutiny and cross checking, ultimately failed to convince his true target audience. But whilst archaeologists have problematised and criticized Heyerdahl’s theory and body of work on scientific grounds, for the most part, they have brushed over the racist assumptions motivating his body of work, failing to address its implications for archaeology and society (Holton 2004: 177; Wahlberg 2013: 143; with the exception of Norbeck 1953: 93).

The racist aspects of Heyerdahl’s and Kon-Tiki’s enduring legacy have proved problematic for archaeology as a discipline. It is crucial to remember that Heyerdahl never recanted his racial migration theory that a superior, fair-haired, white-skinned, bearded, Caucasian race originally brought civilization to South America and from there to the Pacific, and he continued to seek archaeological confirmation of his global racial migration theories until his death in 2002 (Bahn and Flenley 1992: 38; Heyerdahl 2000: 199; Holton 2004: 179; AFI 2016; Magelssen 2016: 28). In the early 1990s the director of the Kon-Tiki Museum continued to defend Heyerdahl’s migration theories at academic conferences (Sinoto and Aramata 2016: 191). Today, the Kon-Tiki Museum not only commemorates Heyerdahl’s work and life, but also positions him as the founding father of experimental maritime archaeology (Magelssen 2016: 40; Solsvik 2012:

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72).13 Whilst Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory is never stated explicitly in the museum displays or website (what Magelssen deems “an exercise in wilful forgetting”), the original documentary which promotes his white-race theory plays daily at the Museum and remains a key visitor attraction (Magelssen 2016: 41; The Kon-Tiki Museum 2018).

Furthermore, since the Kon-Tiki expedition first sailed in 1947, over 40 similar experimental voyages have been attempted by Heyerdahl’s admirers, other scientists, and by survivalist enthusiasts. Many of these expeditions explicitly aimed to build upon or prove Heyerdahl’s migration theory, but have done so without any acknowledgment of the racist aspects or implications of the theory. These experiments have also found a degree of acceptance within archaeology: for example, Penn State University Professor of Anthropology PJ Capelotti has argued in the peer reviewed ExArch journal that Heyerdahl’s expeditions, beginning with Kon-Tiki, are each valid and admirable demonstrations of scientific archaeological hypothesis testing (2012). Again, any acknowledgement of Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory and its implications were absent from such appraisals.

An overview in Science of recent DNA and archaeobotanical research on possible prehistoric contact between South America and the Pacific, indicates that archaeologists have long been privately critical of Heyerdahl’s work as belonging to the realm of racist “crackpot theorists”, a stigma that may have prevented researchers from engaging seriously with the prospect of Pacific-South American contact (Lawler 2010 a: 1344). The only explicit archaeological critique of the racism in Heyerdahl’s work comes from Graham Holton, who has re-examined Heyerdahl’s racial theory migration in the context of diffusionism, imperialism, and racial supremacism.14 Holton argues that Heyerdahl’s use of the concepts of racial types, racial hygiene (pollution and purity), and race wars, coupled with his denial that Polynesians were the originators of their own culture (material, linguistic, and ethnobotanical), reveals Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory to be a form of cultural genocide (2004: 165). The implication of both Holton’s argument, then, is that the Kon-Tiki documentary too, no matter how artful, how

13 A credential also claimed at the end of the recent dramatization, Kon-Tiki (Rønning 2012). 14 At least in the English language. More recently, regarding his search for Odin in Azerbaijan, Norwegian archaeologists have purportedly accused Heyerdahl of pseudoarchaeology, but as these reviews are in Norwegian I have regrettably as of yet been unable to confirm whether they include racism in their critique.

194 Chapter 5 successful, or how popular – has arguably also served as a vehicle of cultural genocide.

Beyond archaeology, theatre and performance historian Scott Magelssen has also examined the continuing growth of the Kon-Tiki brand in the twenty first century and criticized the racist aspects of it, condemning it for alienating Polynesians from their own cultural heritage and accomplishments (2016). Magelssen warns:

“…silence on the subject of Heyerdahl’s racist views could be interpreted

as complicity with 19th-century views. To tell only part of the story, the heart-warming and inspirational part, is not satisfactory.” (Magelssen 2016: 47).

Recently, white supremacists such as Arthur Kemp cite Heyerdahl as a pioneer of white diffusionism and refer to his work as evidence of a White Nordic race being responsible for many of the worlds civilizations, from Peru to Japan (1999: 43, cited in Holton 2004: 176; Kemp 2012).15 Yet while Kemp and others are arguably on the periphery of social and political impact, the use of racial diffusionist arguments is still currency in Latin American politics: used to deny indigenous groups land rights and control over their cultural heritage (Holton 2004: 177). For instance, in the case of the Kon-Tiki expedition, Holton contends that by supporting the expedition Peru’s then-President José Bustamante gained a sort of scientific legitimacy in his opposition to Quechua Indian land rights claims (2004: 177-178). Additionally, Andersson asserts that those within formal and established positions of authority also made use of Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory within a global geo-political context:

“…the Kon-Tiki was an Atlantic story with Norwegian cooperation with the Pentagon to create an allegorical tale of a white race advancing into the Pacific. It was in other words nothing but political. Both Heyerdahl and Nordemar made a brilliant job of rendering the politics invisible, using realist aesthetics in a completely safe way that neutralised the subversive potential of simply showing how something was.” (2010: 130)

15 Holton also found Heyerdahl’s theory (by way of Kemp) cited on the white-supremacist website Stormfront (2004: 176). Following up briefly on this (as it is outside the remit of this thesis), a quick 2019 search of the pro-European Apricity forum found a 2015 thread citing the ‘Nordicism Theory’ of ‘our great hero Thor Heyerdahl’ as evidence of white racial and cultural supremacy and originators of several world civilisations, indicating the continued currency in the 21st century for Heyerdahl’s pseudo-archaeology theory.

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Such criticisms remain on the periphery of academia’s reception of Kon-Tiki however. Academics, particularly archaeologists, have long expressed admiration of Heyerdahl’s expedition and consider the practical demonstration of the Kon- Tiki expedition to be a turning point for promoting and developing further research into Pacific archaeology (Heine-Geldern 1950: 190; Ekholm 1954; Linton 1954; Harrison 1953; Holmes 1958). Over the long-term archaeologists have also been receptive of Heyerdahl’s subsequent excavation work on Rapa Nui, crediting him for “despite his basic stance, he has in fact made some very significant contributions to Polynesian archaeology,” such as his work on chronologies via radiocarbon and obsidian dating, pollen sampling, and Moai related archaeological experiments (quote from Bellwood 1987: 20; see also Bahn and Flenley 1992: 19). Many also cite his work as inspiring them as children to take as interest and eventually pursue careers in archaeology or maritime studies (Andersson 2010: 197). Ultimately, whether they have accepted (if only in part) or rejected Heyerdahl’s thesis, what is indisputable is that Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition and its by-products (including the documentary), brought greater attention to the archaeology of the Pacific region and forced archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists to reconsider their assumptions about the possibility of contact between South America and Polynesia, and about the archaeology of the Pacific more generally (e.g. Norbeck 1953: 94; Luke 1957; Métraux 1978: 300-3001, cited in Holton 2004: 167; Van Tilburg 1994: 164; Sinoto and Aramata 2016: 195). However, whilst academics might turn a blind eye to the racist implications of Kon-Tiki, those on the receiving end – Polynesians – have had no choice but to endure the impact of the Kon-Tiki legacy.

5.3.5 Kon-Tiki’s impact on Polynesians

As well as the above issues, Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory and his pursuit in proving it has had a series of direct impacts upon modern Polynesians, all rooted in his belief in white supremacism. This belief becomes particularly apparent when one considers Heyerdahl’s treatment of Indigenous Pacific islanders in both his archaeological research and in his filming of it. According to The Kon-Tiki Museum website (2018), part of the reason Heyerdahl ended his earlier zoological research at Fatu Hiva in 1937 was due to “problems with the native residents” (remembering that it was here that Heyerdahl claims to have come up with his theory for and which begins the Kon-Tiki narrative). Those “problems” were unspecified by the museum, but it is probable they were the consequence of Heyerdahl and his wife Liv’s illegal collecting of Fatu Hivan craniums and

196 Chapter 5 antiquities – what Heyerdahl referred to as “loot” – which the couple planned to bring back to Norway, despite Fatu Hivan attempts to stop them by Islanders “shadowing” the Heyerdahls during their time on the island (see Still 5.14) (The Kon-Tiki Museum; Melander 2017).

Still 5.14: Liv Heyerdahl examining human remains on Fatu Hiva. This disturbing photograph features on the Kon-Tiki Museum website, indicating how such imagery continues to be used unproblematised, as well as to promote the Heyerdahl’s research today [Source: Kon-Tiki Museum Website (Reproduced with permission of the Kon-Tiki Museum © 2019; and with the consent of the Mayor Henri Tuieinui/Fatu Hiva CODIM)].

Apologist accounts of Heyerdahl’s Fatu Hivan collecting, such as by archaeologist Victor Melander (2017), argue that Heyerdahl was merely a product of his time, attempting to rescue and preserve for science what he considered to be a dying race, especially given that over 90% of the Marquesas islander population was estimated to have died following the introduction of European diseases during the nineteenth century (Melander 2017: 83). However, Heyerdahl’s characterisations of the “savage” “brown ones” and “the thieving nature of the Polynesians” (1938, quoted in Melander 2017: 82, 84), his awareness of how Marquesas islanders were already in the habit of burning and disposing human remains at sea precisely to avoid collectors taking them, and his scheming to smuggle the remains out – all indicate that Heyerdahl’s efforts were very far from any act of benevolence. In fact, Heyerdahl’s real reason for collecting the remains was to fulfil an earlier request for cranial specimens from his friend Dr Hans Günther, a prominent Third Reich race scientist and Nordicist ideologue, who wished to test a nineteenth-century theory that Polynesians were descendent of

197 Chapter 5 the Aryan race (for details see Andersson, who suggests this was where Heyerdahl really derived his racial migration thesis, 2010: 17-22). Heyerdahl had hoped that Günther would become a supporter of his migration research and expedition plans, including sourcing research funding for him, although this never eventuated (Andersson 2010: 22, 40). Heyerdahl later sold parts of his Fatu Hivan collection to Dr Henry Spinden, curator of American Indian and Primitive Cultures at Brooklyn Museum (Andersson 2010: 26). Heyerdahl’s aims then, were clearly self-serving: to further his own research and make financial gain. Such disregard would characterise his treatment of Polynesians in Kon-Tiki as well.

Figure 5.2: Portion of Danish Kon-Tiki (1950) poster featuring a photograph of Reasin in bottom left corner [Source: ‘Kon-Tiki’ IMDB 1950].16

Behind the scenes, after Kon-Tiki was released, Heyerdahl had another personal conflict with Polynesians when Arlette Purea Reasin, one of the Tahitian dancers, attempted to sue Sol Lesser Productions, Heyerdahl, and the distributing company RKO for US $ 150,000 – and to have an injunction against further screenings (The Mail 1951; AFI 2016). Reasin and her husband, who together owned their own plantation (not quite the savage primitives Heyerdahl had idealised), brought the legal complaint via a Los Angeles court on the grounds that Heyerdahl had included Reasin’s dance in the feature film and also featured her image on the film posters and advertising, all without her consent, causing her shame and embarrassment in her community (See Figure 5.1 and 5.2) (The

16 Attempts made by the researcher to find and contact Reasin’s descendants and/or a Tahitian representative Indigenous organisation to discuss the use of this image were unsuccessful. If you are a descendant of Reasin or a Tahitian community member and have questions or concerns about the use of this image in this thesis, please contact the author.

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Mail 1951; AFI 2016). The L.A. judge however ruled that Reasin’s dance had been a “gift” to Heyerdahl, and her case was dismissed.

Heyerdahl’s supporters attempt to defend his disregard for Polynesian accomplishments on the grounds that he was a product of his time (Melander 2017; Solsvik, interviewed in Magelssen 2016: 45). Such an argument falls flat however when one considers that accusations of racism were first levelled at Heyerdahl by his contemporaries, especially when one remembers that over a decade prior to Kon-Tiki, Storck and Lavachery had made the far more self-aware and empathetic archaeology documentary L’Île de Pâques, indicating that even within his time period Heyerdahl was operating at the extreme end of race theory and ethical conduct. Polynesian scholars have also rejected Heyerdahl’s theorising, such as Maori anthropologist Sir Peter Buck who disregarded Kon-Tiki as more adventure than legitimate scientific expedition (cited in Jacoby 1968, by way of Holton 2004: 168). These facts along with the recognition that Heyerdahl never recanted his racial migration theory in the twenty first century shows it is simply not credible to say that Heyerdahl was simply and naively conforming to the prejudices of his time (e.g. Heyerdahl 2000: 199).

Heyerdahl’s supporters have also contended that he always foregrounded Indigenous knowledge in his respective works, and that his research has benefited the modern Rapa Nui community by enabling them to reclaim their culture and history on their own terms (Solsvik 2012: 73). They also point to his nationally and racially diverse crews (from the Ra expeditions onwards), which Heyerdahl deliberately selected to show how a diverse group of men could cooperate, even under stress and difficult conditions (The Kon-Tiki Museum 2018). Yet on none of these expeditions were any Polynesians involved (or women, for that matter), suggesting at best a dismissal of the relevance of Polynesians to even contribute to research about their own history, an odd decision given the premise of Heyerdahl’s career was to prove the origin of Polynesian peoples. Others, such as American Anthropology reviewer Alexandra Klymyshyn criticised Heyerdahl’s painfully paternalistic and arguably manipulative treatment of the Rapa Nui people in his later film Aku-Aku (1976: 385). Thus, in addition to Heyerdahl’s dismissal of the academic community – which The Kon- Tiki Museum, the 2012 drama film, and popular news stories continue to perpetuate – is his equally conceited disregard for Indigenous expertise, perspectives, and ownership of their past. This attitude has been perpetuated after his death by those promoting his legacy. For instance, the 2012

199 Chapter 5 dramatization Kon-Tiki was more invested with celebrating Scandinavian identity than Polynesian, with no filming performed in either South America or Polynesia (the Maldives and Thailand was used as an island stand-in instead), and no Polynesians appear to have been involved in any meaningful roles in its production, if at all.

All that said, one Polynesian community, the Rapa Nui, have reportedly successfully capitalized upon and since moved well beyond Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki branding. Journalist Richard Connard visited Rapa Nui in 1992 and interviewed Rapa Nui craftsmen Pedro Pate, who claimed that during Heyerdahl’s expedition there in 1955 he had asked the Islanders to carve thousands of fake South American style artefacts, exchanging them for cigarettes, clothes, and food (Connard 2002). Connard fact checked these claims with archaeologist William Ayres, then chair of Pacific Island Studies program at the University of Oregon, who confirmed that many of Heyerdahl’s cave finds had since been deemed to be modern creations. One Rapa Nui businessman explained it to Connard thusly: “He was fooling the world. He was making his own spectacle... He was writing the book to make people say, ‘Ah!’ And it was good for the island in a certain way, because tourists came.” Rapa Nui archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg has likewise observed that since the 1950s archaeology and tourism became central to the Rapa Nui economy in the form of what she calls “archaeotourism”. By the 1980s, after building on decades of the Kon-Tiki brand as well as new archaeological scholarship, the Rapa Nui were able to move beyond the Kon-Tiki story to take charge of their own cultural narrative and its telling (Van Tilburg 1994: 165). Recently, for example, in August 2018 Rapa Nui Mayor Pedro Edmunds successfully instigated negotiations with the British Museum towards the repatriation of the Moai Hoa Hakananai, also called the ‘stolen friend’ (evoking the song from L’Île de Pâques about Hanga Oné Oné/Pou Hakanonoga), followed up that November by a joint Rapa Nui-Chilean delegation to London to begin negotiations on the matter (BBC 2018). One of the delegates, Rapa Nui sculptor Benedicto Tuki, took judicious advantage of the high-profile news story to express his desire for all the Moai around the world to be repatriated – a message that made international headlines, including reports by BBC, Fox News, Al Jazeera, and Australia’s SBS (Bartlett 2018; Rogers 2018; Baba 2018; SBS 2018). Intriguingly, repatriation negotiations between Chile’s Cultural Ministry (on behalf of the Rapa Nui) and the Kon-Tiki Museum have also recently commenced (The Guardian 2019; BBC 2019).

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5.3.6 The enduring popularity – and parodying – of Kon-Tiki

Thanks to the legacy of the Kon-Tiki expedition Thor Heyerdahl has become a national hero in Norway and something of an international legend. Despite many scholastic criticisms of his archaeological work, over the course of his life he was awarded with eight honorary Ph.Ds as well as a plethora of medals, prizes, and knighthoods from dozens of countries and scientific societies, including the Retzius Medal from the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography (1950), a Peace Ambassador Award from the United Nations (1976), and the King of Norway appointed him Commander of the Order of St Olav in 1987 (Holton 2004: 166-167; The Kon-Tiki Museum 2018). In 1977 Heyerdahl even had an asteroid named in his honour by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh (Asteroid 2473, cited in Magelssen 2016: 28). In 1990 the BBC utilized Heyerdahl’s extensive archive of film footage to commission a 10-part television biographical documentary series commemorating his life and work, titled The Kon-Tiki Man (Ralling 1990). In 2007, the local municipality in Larvik (Heyerdahl’s town of birth) established a festival, annual regatta, memorial statue and street mural in his honour, and have since purchased his childhood home to turn it into a museum (Østlands-Posten 2018). In 2011, nine years after his death, Heyerdahl’s personal research archives were contributed by Norway to be inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register (UNESCO 2017). This archive comprised Heyerdahl’s manuscripts, papers, notes, photographs, and film materials – including all the rushes from his sailing expeditions, including Kon-Tiki (Solsvik 2012: 71). In 2014, the Norwegian Postal Service released a set of stamps commemorating Kon-Tiki and Heyerdahl on the 100th anniversary of his birthday (Magelssen 2016: 37). Finally, his personal account of the Kon-Tiki expedition was revived again for twenty-first- century audiences in the form of a feature-length dramatization of the original documentary, also titled Kon-Tiki (Rønning and Sandberg, 2012). The dramatization, which took even more artistic license with events than Heyerdahl had, and which omitted Heyerdahl’s racial migration theory, was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Motion Picture, among other prizes (Academy Awards Database 2018; Golden Globe Awards 2018). Evidently the popularity of both Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki brand have continued unabated.

That said, no matter how well constructed, the author of any work can never control how that work will be received and remembered, especially in the long term. Parodies remind us that while audiences are indeed entertained and

201 Chapter 5 inspired by Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki narrative, that they are also critically aware of its more questionable elements.

A good demonstration of the nuanced audience receptions of the Kon-Tiki narrative in the UK, is a 1973 episode of the British comedy television show The Goodies (1970-1982), titled “For Those in Peril on the Sea” (also titled, “The Lost Island of Munga” and “A High-Sea Adventure”. The episode makes and mocks a range of cultural references including The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, South Pacific, and Kon-Tiki. For example, visual references made specific to Kon-Tiki (see stills 5.15) include the character Graeme becoming enthralled by an adventure book about how Vikings in 620AD discovered the Pacific Island of Munga and “decided to tow it back to Norway but the rope broke”. Graeme decides to undertake his own expedition to solve the ancient mystery and find the missing island, spends all the Goodies savings on a replica Viking ship (just as Heyerdahl claimed his raft was an ancient replica), dresses as a Viking (just as Heyerdahl repeatedly referred to his crew as Vikings in both book and film), has a chaotic royal launch (as in the book), and sets to sea, eventually finding (and saving) the natives of Munga, especially the exotic, young, dancing women (again, the similarities are distinct). The rest of The Goodies narrative takes more absurdist comedy turns, but the entry to the episode is clearly a playful parody of the Kon-Tiki expedition – which serves as a reminder that audiences and artists were well aware of the mad and ridiculous elements of the original expedition (which even Heyerdahl humorously acknowledges, 1950: 67).

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Stills 5.15: Parodying Kon-Tiki in The Goodies: “For Those in Peril on the Sea” (1973): (Top left) Graham in a bathtub with a book that resembles Kon- Tiki's cover; (top right) “Why are you done up as a cow?” – Tim questions Graham’s Viking replica clothing; (bottom) the crew launching their replica Viking raft with Princess Anne at Southampton [Source: BBC].

More recently, on the wake of the 2012 Norwegian dramatization of Kon-Tiki, an amateur YouTube parody trailer made by millennial teenagers named Kon Tika Masala (2013) (subtitled: 5 men’s epic quest against their opponents to discover the perfect curry) continue to both sustain and mock the Kon-Tiki narrative, such as the actors wearing of clearly fake red beards, invoking the Kon-Tiki motif (stills 5.16). Such videos demonstrate not only the enduring cultural currency of the original story, but equally that some audiences maintain a healthy scepticism of it, and continue to respond to and make sense of it on their own terms.

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Stills 5.16: Stills from Kon Tika Masala Trailer (2013), in which the red beard of Kon-Tiki returns [Source: Mads Andreassen/YouTube 2013].

5.3.7 Concluding thoughts

Once, at a conference, a colleague asked Heyerdahl how he could persist with his racial migration theory when archaeologists had produced overwhelming evidence that the Rapa Nui culture had, in fact, come from Polynesia. Heyerdahl allegedly “looked down at him like a giant crane peering down on a small worm, and he said, ‘‘Well, I have my audience.”” (Connard 2002). And so, he had.

I have contended that Kon-Tiki was easily the most successful archaeology documentary of the twentieth century, not only in terms of popularity, industry recognition, and commercial success, but as a component in a media strategy intended to promote and fund research of a particular archaeological theory. But as the anti-intellectualism and racist contradictions within the Kon-Tiki brand reveal, Kon-Tiki also serves as an uncomfortable reminder that the success of any archaeology documentary (so often couch in the nebulous terms of ‘reach’ and ‘impact’) cannot and should not be taken as measures of positive social or scholastic influence. Kon-Tiki triumphed at a time when television was beginning to rub up against the documentary film genre, whilst – off the back of years of war propaganda – filmmakers and audiences were increasingly questioning concepts of truth, social justice, and power as expressed in film. The fact that Kon-Tiki was the first archaeology documentary film translated to television positions it as both bridge and foil to the documentary movement at the time, and perhaps to archaeology as well.

5.4 Documentary in the late 1950s and 1960s

In the late 1950s and early 1960s documentary filmmaking underwent a fundamental transformation in both the genre’s mode of production and its role in society. The introduction of portable and high-quality sound tape recorders like

204 Chapter 5 the Nagra allowed on-location synchronised-sound recording with the 16-mm cameras. Thus sound and image could now be recorded simultaneously and in- synch on-location for the first time. Additionally, documentarists like Robert Drew (a student of Flaherty), Richard Leacock, and D.A. Pennebaker (a former electronics engineer), redeveloped the light-weight 16-mm camera models of the day by adding handles to allow a handheld “run-and-gun” approach to filming (Stubbs 2002: 41; Nichols 2017: 132). These new technologies upgraded the 16- mm camera and allowed it to replace the less manoeuvrable 35-mm cameras, which still necessitated sound and image be recorded separately, and therefore required advanced planning, scripting and staging, lighting, studio-sound recording, and re-enactments – as evident in L’Île de Pâques and Kon-Tiki (Barnouw 1993: 235; Aufderheide 2007: 44; Nichols 2017: 132). Together these camera and sound recording innovations increased documentarists mobility and spontaneity, allowing them for the first time to both visually and audibly follow subjects on location and into more intimate spaces, as well as through their regular routines and conversations (Nichols 2017; Aufderheide 2007: 45).

After decades of war propaganda another albeit unexpected legacy of the Second World War was a growing distrust by filmmakers and audiences of state-led media (Aufderheide 2007: 45). With sound as a new marker of a film’s authenticity editing styles began to change, and with them a radical rethinking of filmmaking ethics and paradigms. As anthropologist Roger Sandall notes, filmmakers’ treatment of time could now shift from a highly constructed “film time” back to “real time,” allowing filmmakers to respect the “structural integrity of events” as they had occurred (see Barnouw for further discussion, 1993: 251). These new technologically based opportunities encouraged documentarists to reject the long criticized and now-staid expository mode of filming (such as voice-of-God commentary), to instead embrace new observational and participatory modes of filmmaking. Independent documentarists embraced calls to use the film medium to challenge state and corporate media, to “speak truth to power” as the maxim became, rather than to embrace power and the powerful (Nichols 2017: 4). The two primary documentary movements that exemplified this ethos were direct cinema and cinéma vérité.

In the United States the direct cinema movement advocated a purist take on observational mode of filming – what is colloquially referred to as a “fly-on-the- wall” approach. Direct cinema advocated that in capturing reality filmmakers must surrender control of the filmmaking process by using little or no commentary, no

205 Chapter 5 formal interviews, no reconstructions, and by rendering any evidence of the filmmaker’s presence invisible. Early paragons of direct cinema include Primary (Drew et al. 1960), Don’t Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967), Tititcut Follies (Fred Wiseman 1967), Salesman (Albert and David Maysles, 1969), and Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970) – to name but a few. In stark contrast, French engineer, filmmaker, and anthropologist Jean Rouch pioneered the cinéma vérité movement (the term a direct homage to Vertov’s kino-pravda or cinema truth) (Aufderheide 2007: 60; Barnouw 1993: 254).17 Cinéma vérité exemplified the participatory and reflexive modes – more of a “fly-in-the-soup” philosophy – in which the subjects were encouraged to tell their own stories, the craft of filmmaking was made explicit, and debates about reality and representation were problematised on screen. For example, Rouch pioneered the jump-cut as an editing technique that makes the difference between sequential shots explicit to the viewer – a visual highlighting of the constructedness of film – which has since become a staple editing device. Cinéma vérité was also characterised by filmmakers’ personal relationships with and provocations of subjects on camera, such as collaborative docu-drama reconstructions and vox-pop interviews. Prime examples of the cinéma vérité movement include Chronicle of a Summer (1961), The Lovely May (Chris Marker 1963), and The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophüls, 1970).

There appear to be no cases of archaeology documentaries that emerged within the body of the direct cinema or cinéma vérité movements, or none that have survived and are known of. One potential candidate might be the Polish documentary portrait of an archaeological excavation of Auschwitz by Andrzej Brzozoski, titled Archeologia (1967), which was critically acclaimed (awarded the Silver Lion at the International Documentary Film Festival, Venice, 1968), and has continued to be screened within recent festival retrospectives (e.g. IDFA 1994).18 But without access to view Archeologia, I cannot confirm its mode. Overall, the apparent absence of archaeology as a documentary film subject across two of the most significant documentary movements in film history is perplexing and deeply regrettable. Yet, right as archaeology appears to have disappeared from the

17 Additionally, Rouch’s cinéma vérité is also recognised as foundational to the genre of ethnographic filmmaking, and Rouch is also considered a founding figure in Nigerian cinema. 18 Decades later, Archeologia also provided clues to the curator of the Auschwitz Museum to finding the excavated material shown in the film, which had since gone missing (see Cywiński et al. 2016).

206 Chapter 5 documentary film genre during this period, it simultaneously blossomed on television under the new genre of ‘factual TV’.

5.5 Archaeology and factual TV

Beginning in the 1950s, archaeology shifted from serving as subject matter for non-fiction and documentary cinema, to instead become a staple of television, particularly in the UK. Although archaeology on television been critiqued by archaeologists (discussed throughout this thesis, but pertinently Perry, 2017; Kulik, 2005; and Piccini, 2007b), most critiques have primarily focused on television as a platform of media communication, whilst instead I seek to maintain here a documentary genre focused lens 19. Films like Kon-Tiki testify that some cinematic documentaries successfully transitioned across media platforms during this period. More commonly however, archaeology was made and broadcast in the new format of factual TV programming, rather than in the forms traditional of documentary films. During this period documentarists like Paul Rotha sought to establish a place for documentary films within the burgeoning ecology of television, but the growing cultural and political significance of television in society would ultimately make it a battle-ground between an increasingly politicized and independent cinematic documentary tradition and an increasingly government regulated and commercialised broadcasting industry. Therefore, to understand archaeology’s transition to television, let us take a brief digression and examine the emergence of the early television industry, television’s impact on the documentary genre, and archaeology’s subsequent new role in the media.

5.5.1 Television and the “taming” of documentary

Televisual technology has its roots in late-nineteenth-century experiments, but television as we know it really took shape after the advent of broadcasting, when it evolved from a technological novelty to a medium of mass culture. Thus, particularly for the purposes of this thesis, television’s significance, and its key point of difference to the documentary industry and tradition are best understood through television’s role as a new medium of distribution.

19 For the sake of brevity this section primarily focuses on the UK, however it should be noted that Tom Stern (2007) provides an excellent and complementary review of archaeology in German film and television, particularly regarding the 1980s-2000s.

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Britain’s response to the invention of television broadcast technology followed on from Britain’s approach to radio broadcasting: television would be first and foremost a public service medium in the form of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), funded and regulated by the government via a licensing fee, to be broadcast for the benefit of British citizens regardless of class or geography. This conception of a broadcaster’s contract to society owes much to the vision of John Reith, the first managing director of the BBC, after whom the term ‘Reithian’ is named. Perhaps uniquely, Britain appears to have been the first nation to conceive of television as a tool of state-run mass democracy and national identity building, rather than an opportunity for mass consumerism (in comparison, for example, the US initially addressed broadcast television by integrating it into its consumer market-place) (Murdock 2000; Scrannel 2000). And although commercial competitors in Britain were granted access to the airways later – ITV in 1954, Channel 4 in 1980, and others after this – the original three all subscribed in some degree to the values of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB). Principally they ascribed to the now-well established Reithian ethos ‘inform, educate, and entertain’ through mixed programming targeting a newly reconceived “general public” (Scannell 2000: 51; Harvey 2000: 93). From the beginning then, British television assumed a duty towards its audience to act as an educational equalizer, granting public access to a diversity of political, cultural, sporting, religious, ceremonial, scientific, and entertainment content – and this duty was held to be more important than achieving high ratings (particularly for the BBC. See Scannell 2000: 50, 53; Whittaker 2001: 148). Embedded into this educational remit came standards determining the boundaries of good taste and acceptable political perspectives. Although undeniably paternalistic, these aspirations also evince the deep commitment to and sincere faith broadcasters had in the power of television to improve society through education. Such sentiment is illustrated in the words of the first director of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), Roger Manvell, who judged the value of television to be on par with that of the printing press:

“It has sometimes happened in the past that new opportunities for communication have developed at precisely the time they were needed for the practical application of new thinking. The most obvious example has been the indispensable part played by printing in the development of European thought and education during and since the Renaissance […] The new opportunity in the twentieth century is broadcasting in sound and vision, combined with recording in film and tape. This form of

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communication has arrived at a time when the whole pattern of civilisation is changing, and when the thinking that goes with this needs the widest possible dissemination. The twentieth century represents a new educational era in human history.” (Manvell 1963: 2, quoted in Swallow 1966: 164).

Television critic A.A. Gill, whose father Michael Gill produced and directed Civilisation (1969), also remembered and described this attitude of programme makers of the period:

“…it was a very tweedy thing. And television was going to be the medium that took what intellectual people got from books, and distilled it and gave it to people who didn’t have bookshelves. And the great thing about television was it was going to be this open box, this window […] into a better world. And they absolutely believed that.” (Gill 2011).

However, contrary to the foundational ideals of early programme makers the reality of the television broadcast ecology was always at its core one of commercial competition, which unsurprisingly resulted in discord between film and programme makers, broadcasting institutions, and government regulators. As well as the inevitable competition for audiences, broadcasters had to justify their government-provided budgets and their monopoly on licenses of the government-maintained transmitters and airways, and were therefore subject to increasingly tighter government oversight via consecutive Broadcasting Acts and governmental reviews, as well as the practical constraints of broadcast technologies, schedules, and media competitors (Chapman 2001: 134). Government bureaucracy and industry practicalities came to dictate all terms of production, from funding, to schedule slots, to institutional- and/or self- censoring of content.20 With so many variables at play and so many conflicting aims, it was inevitable that there would be considerable tension about the direction of programming content. Such friction was especially apparent between the majority of programme makers who came to television from print journalism and radio broadcasting, and those who had come from the independent documentary filmmaking tradition (Aufderheide 2007: 58; Kilborn and Izod 1997: 25). In sum, television was entirely different medium, economy, and experience that of independent documentary filmmaking and cinema.

20 Not to mention the need to compete for audience’s attention within their own viewing environments, see Piccini 1999 for a discussion on archaeology TV and ‘habitus.’

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At the same time as the television industry was finding its feet and honing its role in society, documentary filmmakers continued to make feature films that tackled increasingly controversial subjects, including questioning the authority of nation states and corporations. The growing documentary community also became more left-wing and independent in character – characteristics that made documentaries distinctly unappealing to broadcasters (Aufderheide 2007: 62). Yet among audiences (and some commissioners) documentaries sustained a position of respect, maintaining a belief that they could not be dispensed with in any truly democratic, culturally progressive forum. Therefore, television commissioners supported and commissioned some documentary works and under public service remits there has always been a reserved slot for documentaries somewhere in television broadcast schedules to maintain a channel’s public service broadcasting commitment. Yet by and large television has long acted as a bottleneck for documentary productions. To have their works televised some documentarists were faced with the decision of whether to self-censor by softening any political or challenging content which government or corporate powers (by way of the broadcasters) deemed inappropriate for mass public audiences (Kilborn and Izod 1997: 22, 24; Barnouw 1993: 339). Kilborn and Izod nicely sum up the discontent felt by many documentarists regarding documentary’s “fatal downward spiral”:

“For some documentary filmmakers, then, television was and is seen as something of a bête noire, which, whilst seeming to increase the number of factual/documentary slots, has proved an unreliable servant of the documentary cause” (1997: 21; 172).

Since the early days of television then, broadcasters adopted two strategies for dealing with the documentary genre: the first was to censor or ban productions from public broadcast, particularly within their countries of origin. For example, the American direct cinema prison documentary Titicut Follies (1967) was banned from US broadcast and release for 25 years, despite winning critical acclaim internationally. Likewise, French cinéma vérité film The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), was banned on French television for 12 years for revealing French government complicity with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, despite also winning an Academy Award in 1971. In the UK, Peter Watkins’ Cold War docudrama about the possibility of a nuclear war The War Game (1965) – despite being originally commissioned by the BBC – was considered “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting” and risked negatively impacting public attitudes toward

210 Chapter 5 nuclear weapons, and so was banned from domestic broadcast for 20 years despite winning the Academy Award for best documentary in 1966 (BBC Press Release, in Kilborn and Izod 1997: 167; 244).

The other strategy television broadcasters used to incorporate the documentary genre but to mitigate the political and commercial risks it carried, was to mimic and replace documentary with factual TV. Factual TV programmes borrowed documentary modes and conventions (or by now, “pretensions”, according to Ward 2005: 14, 4), particularly those of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, relying on the sense of authenticity and reality these conventions conveyed to evoke a veneer of authenticity and credibility. As Buscombe explains:

“…they seek to heighten audience involvement by deploying the full range of techniques traditionally associated with news and documentary: handheld cameras, direct sound, location shooting, and so forth. Because the audience believe what they are seeing is true, its interest is reinforced by such techniques and made more intimate.” (2000: 17).

Television’s application of documentary modes and conventions can be clearly seen across factual TV series (science, history, and arts programmes), cooking and lifestyle shows, advertisements, and reality TV (Aufderheide 2007: 55). Likewise, whilst factual TV programmes do appear to maintain Nichols’ four criteria for documentary status, the expression of these criteria are often shallow and at times questionable. For instance, in television, as directors are hired on a short-term basis by series producers – and sometimes only to perform the filming, not even the planning or editing of a programme – they must conform to a predetermined formula for the production. This means the rhetorical address usually reliant on the director’s (or the authors / auteur’s) ‘voice’ is largely absent from factual TV programmes. Instead it is replaced with a façade of authorship provided by hired performers who narrate the story either in the role of presenters or as voice-overs, a role sometimes given depth with the performer’s input, but often as carefully scripted by teams of writers and producers. Nichols’ other criteria are equally diminished in factual TV: action scenes might be staged or rehearsed (hardly indexical documentation), poetic experimentation is reduced to clichés and gap filling, and narrative storytelling is often fabricated and recycled. Thus as MacDonald and Cousins incisively put it regarding television’s treatment of vérité: “what started as a revolution, has ended up a style choice” (1996: 251, quoted in Ward 2005: 14). By using documentary conventions factual TV helped fulfil broadcasters’ public service remit to ‘educate, inform, and

211 Chapter 5 entertain’ audiences, whilst staying politically un-provocative, within-budget, on- brand, and through tried and tested formulas and pre-scripting it remained easy to control and reproduce. Barnouw has described this process as the “taming” of documentary by television (1993: 240; see also Nichols 2016: 200; Ward 2005: 4; Hill 2005; Aufderheide 2007: 62). Another, perhaps more archaeological way of putting it: factual TV became a domesticated adaptation of documentary filmmaking.

Let us return to the subject at hand. For archaeology, the conflict between these two media spheres instigated archaeology’s abrupt turn away from cinematic documentary to instead embrace factual TV, particularly in Britain. Consequently, archaeology appears to have largely missed out on the direct benefits of the ground-breaking documentary movements such as direct cinema and cinéma vérité, and instead become subject matter (some would say fodder) for factual TV series, game shows, magazine-style lifestyle programmes, and reality TV. That said, by embracing factual TV, archaeology has reaped many benefits from television: the shared educational aims of both archaeology and early television to “inform, educate and entertain” a public broadcast audience has established an enduring bond between archaeology and television. There has also been reciprocity in the form of television funding archaeological research projects and teaching, and television’s audience reach and impact has arguably helped legitimise and cement new sub-disciplines of archaeology, including industrial, maritime, and experimental archaeologies. All of this was only possible through the agency of archaeologists and television creatives who served as cross- fertilizers between archaeology and television, bringing the best (and at times worst) of archaeology to the screen.

5.5.2 1930s–2010s: Archaeology embraces factual TV

Archaeology made its inaugural debut on British television in 1937, featuring live- broadcast studio-based lectures and laboratory demonstrations (see Perry 2011; 2017). Helmed by BBC executive producer Mary Adams, who would become a long-term supporter of archaeology on television, these early programmes easily served the BBC’s Reithian goals to inform, educate, and entertain audiences, although the restrictive hours and the London-centric reach of 1930s broadcasting limited their impact. The Second World War and its aftermath had briefly slowed developments in both film and television, but Adams had by now

212 Chapter 5 proven archaeology to be a dependable television staple with sustained audience interest.

In 1949 in the US, the first regularly scheduled archaeology programming was broadcast when Penn Museum director Froelich Rainey devised an archaeological quiz show called What in the World (WITW). The show was premised on a parlour game concept: a panel of expert guests competed to identify objects from the Penn Museum’s collection including archaeological, ethnographic, and natural history specimens. It was a tremendous success, gaining national syndication by CBS from 1951 until 1955, winning the Peabody Award in 1952, and it continued to be broadcast on non-commercial stations until 1966 – in total a run of 17 years (Perry 2017: 3; Penn Museum 2018). Its initial success brought the gameshow format to the attention of Mary Adams, by then BBC’s ‘Head of Talks’, who adapted it into the equally successful quiz show for British audiences, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (Daniel 1986: 247; Hawkes 1982: 298; Swallow 1966:131).21

In commissioning Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (AVM, 1952 - 1960), Adams brought together a group of filmmakers and archaeologists who would come to play crucial roles in entrenching archaeology on British television. Firstly, Mary Adams hired a 32-year-old Paul Johnstone as the producer of AVM?, his first television production (Daniel 1986: 247, 437; Hawkes 1982: 298). Johnstone would go on to produce more high-profile archaeological factual series including Buried Treasure (1954-1959) and Chronicle (1966-1976), and would develop such a solid commitment to archaeology that he eventually even published his own maritime archaeology research in Antiquity (Johnstone 1962; 1964; 1972). For his efforts, Johnstone was also later elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1973 (Attenborough, quoted in Daniel 1986: 439; Daniel 1978: 8).

Adams also hired a young David Attenborough as a production assistant on AVM, a connection which in 1966 influenced Attenborough – by then promoted to Controller of BBC2 – to establish a dedicated Archaeology and History Unit with

21 At this time, Paul Rotha had also transitioned to BBC television as Head of Documentary, from 1953 to 1955. Keeping in mind Rotha’s earlier scathing criticisms of “amusement cinema” (Chapter Four section 4.4.2), one can imagine the likely depth of division between the BBC’s “documentary” and “talks” departments.

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Johnstone as executive producer and archaeologist Glyn Daniel as advisor (Daniel 1978: 7; 1986: 261) – the first dedicated archaeology television unit in the world.

Joining the AVM crew, Professor Mortimer Wheeler stepped in front of the camera for the first time in 1952, 15 years after his off-screen contributions as advisor and script consultant to Mary Adam’s 1937 televised archaeology lecture programmes. Wheeler’s on-screen charisma combined with his archaeological expertise not only established him as a successful television personality but also gave him opportunities to promote his own archaeological interests, such as collaborating with Johnston to create Buried Treasure episodes about Indian and Zimbabwean archaeology, and further programmes featuring archaeological tours of Cadbury and Rome, and of sites across Greece and Libya (Hawkes 1982; Daniel 1986; Swallow 1966: 136).

Cambridge archaeologist and Antiquity editor Glyn Daniel also made the move from radio and lecture hall, to television screen, for AVM.22 Although originally cast as a guest panellist Adams quickly recast Daniel as AVM’s host, which in turn led to Daniel working as co-creator and host of Buried Treasure, co-creator of Man Discovers His Past (1965), and host of Chronicle (Daniel 1986). Not sated with his on-screen duties, in 1958 Daniel accepted a position on the board of directors of Anglia Television (a franchise of the new Independent Television Authority), a position he held until 1981. This enabled him to commission multiple 6-part television archaeological series, with director/producer Forbes Taylor, and writer/host archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor: Once a Kingdom (date unknown), the BAFTA nominated Who Were the British? (1966), and The Lost Centuries (1971), as well as further one-offs (Daniel 1986: 258). Coming full circle, Forbes-Taylor and Paul Jordan would in-turn produce a television programme about Glyn Daniel’s own life and archaeological work in 1981 (Daniel 1986: 262).

Again, developments in technology also informed the scope of early televised archaeology. After Britain’s first imports of video recorders in 1957, programme makers were liberated from the restrictive dependence on broadcasting live studio performances or acquired films, to instead pre-shoot and edited their own for-television content. In practical terms, for instance, this meant archaeologists could come in to studios be filmed as their own schedules allowed, rather than as

22 Although Daniel had already had a taste of presenting war-time propaganda for television in 1941 (see Jordan 1981: 207).

214 Chapter 5 dictated by live broadcasting schedules (ITV and Joseph, 1980: 37). This enabled dozens more archaeologists and anthropologists to share their expertise on these television programmes, as guest panellists and hosts, as well as advisers and script-writers. Such contributors included Gordon Childe, Julian Huxley, Margaret Mead, Kathleen Kenyon, Jacquetta Hawkes, Stuart Piggott, Margaret Wheeler, Richard Atkinson, Basil Greenhill, John Hale, Kenneth Hudson, Colin Renfrew, and Ray Sutcliffe – to name but a few.

It is indisputable that as much as television embraced archaeology, archaeology embraced television with equal enthusiasm. Archaeologists fully subscribed to the Reithian goals of public betterment (with a dose of Griersonian propaganda), which matched their own attitudes towards public engagement and education (e.g. Hawkes 1946; Kraemer 1958: 266; Evans 1967: 1; Fowler 2007). Glyn Daniel stated it explicitly:

“AVM was a success because it lived up to the Reith formula of what broadcasting should do, namely ‘instruct, inform and entertain’. […] [Thus] were the five million viewers of AVM flabbergasted and excited by the knowledge and expertise of the archaeologists.” (Daniel 1986: 256).

Additionally, as further evidence of this embracing of Reithian values, Daniel said the following of Johnstone:

“Paul knew better than we did what the TV audience should be taught to like, and how he could mould archaeologists and anthropologists to give them educated entertainment.” (Emphases mine, Daniel 1978: 7).

Archaeology’s consolidation of its place within factual TV had continued since the days of Adams, Johnstone, and Daniel, lulling briefly during the 1980s (Kulik 2006: 80; 2007: 122), before peaking in the 2000s with audience-ratings successes such as Time Team (1994-2012), Coast (2005-2015), Digging for Britain (2010-current), and a plethora of regular “block-buster” features and mini- series featuring discoveries of shipwrecks, ancient cities, or investigations of distant historical figures (for an analysis of television at the turn of the millennium see Kulik 2006). Factual TV formats have also fostered regional clones and spin-offs, such as Time-Team America (2009-2014), and less directly, History Channel Australia’s Tony Robinson’s Time Walks (2012-2014), both fashioned after the success of Time Team. Factual TV also now extends to “factual entertainment” in the form of various reality TV series adopting archaeological

215 Chapter 5 themes (to varying degrees of quality), from Living in the Past (1978) through to competitive gameshows 10,000 BC (2015-2016) and Bromans (2017).

Archaeologists continued to hold expectations that archaeology television programming should be educational as well (e.g. Jordan 1981: 208; Cunliffe 1981: 92; Nichols 2006; Bremner 2001: 69, 70; Schablitsky and Hetherington 2012; Bonnachi 2013). Paul Jordan summed up what archaeologists expected of the relationship between archaeology and television by the 1980s:

“Television and archaeology are met in a satisfyingly symbiotic relationship, feeding upon each other, and generating in the process public information and enlightenment and new recruits for both the academic and the professional pursuit of the study.” (1981: 213)

That archaeology has come to be a staple of the factual TV genre is also accepted unquestioningly by some television scholars – for example Professor of Media Arts Edward Buscombe lists archaeology alongside gardening, cooking, wildlife, and art programmes as examples of television’s “wealth of entertainment” (Buscombe 2000: 9). Archaeology’s categorisation as ‘factual TV’ content was also apparent to me during my attendances at the commissioning panels at Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival (Doc/Fest), where archaeology programmes were exhibited by broadcasters to prospective production companies as examples of desired content in the ‘Factual Science’ and ‘Factual History’ sessions (2015), and in the ‘Specialist Factual’ session (2018) – but at no point was archaeology included in the ‘Documentary’ commissioning of panels either year (there also appears to be less diverse and distinct factual departments now than 2003, as compared with Hill 2005: 43, cited in Piccini 2007b: 225).

5.5.3 Benefits of factual TV for archaeology

Archaeology has obtained genuine benefits thanks to its close relationship with factual TV which should not be underestimated. As Jordan has claimed (1981: 209), the 1950s indeed appears to have been a ‘“golden age” for archaeology on television – or at the very least a golden age for popularity. Audience reach and impact was of course the primary aim from archaeologists and television producers alike, although Daniel’s claim that shows like AVM in fact reached a viewership of 5 million cannot be verified. However, the fact that Wheeler and Daniel were both consecutively awarded BAFTA Television Personality of the Year (1954 and 1955 respectively), indicates the level of public support of these

216 Chapter 5 productions and their successful popularising of archaeology among British audiences (Daniel 1954: 203; 1986: 256, 268; Hawkes 1982: 301; BAFTA 2019a; 2019b). Likewise, during this period, the increase in popularity of museums and archaeological resources at public libraries has also been attributed to archaeology’s high profile as generated by AVM (Jordan 1981: 208).

Significant audience reach continued to be achieved by programmes such as Time Team which at its peak from 1998-2002 drew in domestic ratings averaging approximately three million viewers per episode, and the show was critically recognised by industry via its nomination of a BAFTA in 1999 and the British Archaeology Award for Best Representation of Archaeology in the Media (2012), and has also been anecdotally credited with inspiring students to pursue archaeology studies at university (Taylor 1998: 15; 2007: 192; Holtorf 2005: 42; Fowler 2007: 94; Price 2007: 177). Factual TV programmes have also engendered a reciprocal form of engagement between archaeology and avid audience members, as demonstrated by members of the public inviting productions like Time Team to excavate newly found sites, or by sharing their finds with the Portable Antiquities Scheme via Britain’s Secret Treasures (2012 - 2013). By popularising emergent archaeological sub-fields, factual TV has also been credited with legitimising those sub-fields in the eyes of academia as worthy of study, such as maritime archaeology, experimental archaeology, and industrial archaeology (Greenhill 1978: 25; Hudson 1978: 132)

Factual TV has also played a research and sponsorship role in archaeology. Television broadcasters have explicitly funded – whether in whole or in part – excavations, laboratory investigations, and archaeological experiments via programmes such as BBC’s Chronicle, and Channel 4’s Time Team, resulting not only in content for broadcasting but also donations of excavated materials to local museums, and published research data available for study (e.g. Atkinson 1978; Harrison 1978: 42; Daniel et al. 1978; Jordan 1981: 211; Taylor 1998: 22; Price 2007; see also Perry 2017). Hosts and hired presenters were paid for their contributions and could negotiate for higher rates – for example around 1954, Wheeler appears to have increased his appearance fee from 25 to 30 guineas, equivalent to an estimated (and surprisingly low) £797 in 2018 (Hawkes 1982: 302).23 Television companies also made monetary or in-kind gifts to archaeologist

23 £30 in 1954 → 2017 | UK Inflation Calculator. U.S. Official Inflation Data, Alioth Finance, 27 June 2018, https://www.officialdata.org/1954-GBP-in-2017?amount=30.

217 Chapter 5 colleagues such as Anglia Television’s gifting of £10,000 in 1974 to Glyn Daniel in celebration of his election to Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge – equivalent to approximately (and surprisingly high) £101,000 in 2018 (Daniel 1986: 425; University of Cambridge 2010).24 Daniel used Anglia Television’s gift to fund an undergraduate student prize at the University of Cambridge, and seven years of joint fieldtrips for University of Cambridge and University of Southampton undergraduates to visit European museums and archaeological sites (Daniel 1986: 425; University of Cambridge 2010). Coming full circle, broadcasters have also awarded monetary prizes to archaeological projects. Chronicle’s sub-series which ran for three years, Win a Second Hand Crane (1970- 1973), had the Controller of BBC Robin Scott award a cheque of £250 (approx. £3,750 in 2018) to the winner among competing amateur archaeology clubs, to be spent on their preservation projects (Hudson 1978: 128).25 More recently, between 2000 and 2008 Channel 4 sponsored ‘The Channel Four Awards’ in archaeological film, video, and interactive productions, at the annual British Archaeological Awards (British Archaeology Awards 2000). This award has continued in various guises since 2008, without Channel 4 sponsorship, although the connection remains as the Channel 4 programme Time Team won the award in 2012.

5.5.4 Drawbacks of factual TV for archaeology

Yet, particularly in Britain, archaeology’s embracing of factual TV to the detriment of traditional documentary film has created problems as well. Television producer Norman Swallow (a colleague of Attenborough and Johnstone) observed early on that originality in factual TV was extremely rare (1966: 213), although perhaps television critic A.A. Gill phrased it best: “television is a medium that consumes its children until it makes itself sick” (2011). With few exceptions, once established as a ratings-worthy, risk-free, standardized product, factual TV formulas tend to offer little new in style and content. Contrary to claims of new revolutionary television formats (e.g. Taylor 1998: 14), the bulk of factual TV archaeology programmes are reprisals of the earlier lecture films,

24 £10,000 in 1974 → 2018 | UK Inflation Calculator. U.S. Official Inflation Data, Alioth Finance, 24 June 2018, https://www.officialdata.org/1974-GBP-in-2018?amount=10000 . 25 £250 in 1970 → 2018 | UK Inflation Calculator.” U.S. Official Inflation Data, Alioth Finance, 29 June 2018, https://www.officialdata.org/1970-GBP-in-2018?amount=250 .

218 Chapter 5 demonstrations, or updated versions of earlier programmes (also discussed by Perry 2017; Kulik 2006).

The following visual comparison (stills 5.20) between a selection of episodes of Buried Treasure (Stonehenge 1954, Peat Bog Murder Mystery 1954, and The Walls of Jericho 1956) and Digging for Britain (Series 7, West 2018; Series 5, West, North, 2016), shows how little factual TV formats have changed over 60+ years. They are all presenter-led and generally follow magazine-style formulas which are either tour based or method-based procedurals following field-walks, excavations, forensic investigations, experimental reconstructions, re-enactments (sometimes as docu-drama), or a combination of these. Standard storytelling devices – as shown – include studio-based panel discussions which give structure to the narrative, illustrated with graphics such as models (real or CGI), and a generous usage of cut away footage of close ups of object handling and excavations. Television critic Sally Kinnes’ interview with programme producer Phillip Day gives an insider’s perspective of one such production (Lost Worlds 2002):

“Just as archaeological programmes have become staples of the schedules, so too is the way they are made. There are new rules that have come from America and, says Day, are set in stone. ‘All these archaeology programmes you see are co-productions, and they are becoming ever more driven by a formula because they can no longer afford to make versions for each market. My film follows the formula because it has to.’ It asks a question every four or five minutes. It has a cliff hanger before each commercial break, and a reprise at the beginning of each part. ‘The Americans’ expectation for their audience is such that they treat them almost like imbeciles. They assume the audience knows nothing.” (Kinnes 2002, quoted in Kulik 2006: 78).

At this point the fault lines of unchecked Reithianism begin to become apparent. As discussed earlier in this thesis many archaeologists have lamented what they consider to be a gradual ‘dumbing down’ of archaeological content on television – an issue Reith himself forewarned radio broadcasters of, as early as 1925:

“[h]e who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for lower standards which he himself will then satisfy.” (Reith 1925: 3, in Scannell 2000: 47).

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Stills 5.17: Comparison of documentary visual storytelling devices in Factual TV, including presenters, panels, models, cut-aways of artefact handling, and excavations in process, as exhibited in Buried Treasure (left) and Digging for Britain (right) [Source: BBC, 2018].

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At its most extreme, archaeology in factual TV stops being recognisable as what archaeologists would consider archaeology to be, let alone serve their educational ideals. US produced series Ancient Aliens (2010 - ongoing), American Digger (2012 - 2013), and Battlefield Recovery (2016; previously Nazi War Diggers) are all recent examples of factual entertainment television that trade upon archaeological themes but are clearly designed to pursue entertainment ratings alone, rather than serve any sincere educational or informational remit (for further factual TV critiques see also Fowler 2007; Pitts 2012; Thomas et al. 2015).

Yet, as frustrating as this lowest-common-denominator programming may be, it is not my primary concern. What archaeologists should really be concerned about – yet rarely are – is the gradual erasure of archaeology’s social and political relevance in archaeological film and television, particularly in Britain. As science historian Timothy Boon observed of the science programming during the Cold War, there is an element of propaganda about factual TV that minimizes any potential for social or political commentary, instead focusing on uncontroversial demonstrations of the scientific method, such as “how-it-works” formulas, and the reporting of so-called “pure science” (Boon 2008: 221). Documentary theorist Bill Nichols is also critical of television’s use of light entertainment as maintenance of conservative viewpoints and maintaining the status quo – and his words can be applied to archaeology on television as well:

“…the vast majority of entertainment the eschews the darker, more complex issues that lie beneath the “feel good” tone of quiz shows, comedies, Hollywood gossip, routine news reports that pass along what politicians and businessmen want us to hear, along with the spectacle of reality TV and its clever play between contempt and fascination for eccentric characters whose lives never seem to intersect with the political and the fraught issues of the day, inevitably creates a zero degree of cultural expectation that any more trenchant work must overcome. The machinery of entertainment, with its hands-off attitude towards the political, acts to disqualify works that take a different tack…” (Nichols 2016: 221)

It is evident that beginning in the 1930s, taking flight in the 1950s and continuing through to the 2010s, that a socially and politically conservative tradition of archaeologically themed factual TV, premised not around content but the aim of cultivating audience consumption, has proved to be a primetime prize for broadcasters as well as being largely embraced by and of great benefit to

221 Chapter 5 archaeology. In this way, archaeological content had arguably become a vassal to factual TV formatting. In Britain, as archaeological storytelling thrived on television over this period, it simultaneously became scarce within the independent documentary film tradition.

In sum, despite an apparent bounty of archaeological content on television today, these factual TV productions can be seen to be part of a wider shift towards more entertaining, cheaply produced, and ratings-led programming (such as reality TV) and away from educative or status-quo challenging content (such as traditional documentary). Looking at the shift more closely, film and television scholars have identified this as a growing trend, wherein broadcasters are responding to incremental defunding, deregulation via privatisation, and mounting political pressure from conservative governments beginning in the 1980s and 1990s. This shifting state of affairs also came after the first television trade union strikes began in 1969, and after negative findings of the Peacock Committee in 1986 and the 1992 Broadcasting Act which shifted broadcasting principles from terms of public beneficence to terms of economic trade – recasting the audience as consumers, and programmes as private commodities (Whittaker 2001: 153, 154; Scannell 2000: 54, 55). In response, BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 adopted a more commercial approach to broadcasting, reducing documentary commissioning and scheduling, and instead pursuing a more diverse but entertainment and ratings- led strategy (Hill 2005: 18, 39; Winston 2000: 40; Kilborn and Izod 1997: xi, 175, 184). Even new commercial satellite and cable channels such as Discovery (arriving in Europe in 1989) and History Channel (1995) gave preference to non- controversial, ratings-led factual TV rather than critical documentaries (Kilborn and Izod 1997: 179). Broadcaster deregulation also resulted in fewer programmes being made ‘in house’ by specialist units (such as the earlier archaeology and history departments of BBC and Anglia Television) and led to a reliance on smaller independent production companies producing the programmes and therefore carrying the risks of production – economic, political, or otherwise (Kilborn and Izod 1997: 23). These companies and their programmes have at the same time increasingly come under scrutiny from broadcaster and governmental bodies to ensure they do not breech increasingly conservative broadcast standards or boundaries. Writing in 1994, Kilborn noted:

“…there might be some justification for believing that documentary is (as some would claim) an endangered species. The fear is that, as the commercial imperative becomes ever more insistent, so broadcasters will

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take the line of least resistance and seek refuge in ever-tackier forms of factual broadcasting, with emphasis on infotainment, to the virtual exclusion of more challenging, innovative forms of documentary” (Kilborn 1994, quoted in Kilborn and Izod 1997: 177).

Likewise, Hill described the dire situation for documentary commissioning (and thus also for archaeology documentaries) incisively:

“[Reality TV] owes its greatest debt to documentary television, which has almost disappeared from television screens in the wake of popular factual programming. Documentary television, a ‘duty genre’, has withered on the vine during a decade of the commercialization of public service channels.” (Hill 2005: 39).

Perhaps the bleakest assessment of the situation can be found in the very words of television commissioners themselves, such as Channel 4 Head of Documentary Commissioner Peter Dale who put it most bluntly in 2003 (during a panel at Sheffield Doc/Fest): “I produce the eye candy for advertisers,” (quoted by way of Gaunt, in Piotrowska 2012: 249).

Additionally, although some documentaries are still commissioned and broadcast as “the necessary ballast in the freightage of any station”, the more ‘serious’ documentaries struggle to even source production funding, and even if they survive production often end up being ‘ghettoised’ to late slots on secondary channels such as BBC2, BBC4, or left off television entirely and shelved on under- serviced digital platforms, whilst softer factual entertainment has taken over primetime mainstream slots (Triffit 1996, quoted in Kilborn and Izod 1997: xi; also 185; Kilborn 2003: 43, cited in Hill 2005: 18; Kulik 2006: 79). In the mid- 2000s, Kulik lamented the ‘narrowcasting’ and ghettoization of archaeology to secondary channels as a sign of the collapse of the “mixed diet” that legitimises the public service remit of broadcasters, resulting in audiences “knowing more and more about less and less” (2006: 77).

Admittedly, there are exceptions. Some rare cases of archaeological factual TV programmes have snuck into television slots and still managed to gently challenge the status quo, edging towards a traditional documentary ethos. An early example of this was For Love or Money (1973): an episode of Chronicle that compared the philosophy of British industrial archaeology to European varieties, raising thorny questions of class, memory, and archaeology’s role in society (see Hudson 1978). Likewise, Civilisation: A Personal View By Kenneth Clark (1969)

223 Chapter 5 received revisionist treatment in the remake Civilisations (2018 – note the plural); while rival production Indus Valley to Indira Gandhi (S. Krishnaswamy 1970) was created expressly to rebuke the Western-centric premise of the original and other like it films (see Barnouw 1993: 316). But if the aim of archaeology is not only to push at the boundaries of our knowledge about the past, but to also call attention to the importance of the past and its relevance to modern society, then these factual TV programmes pale in comparison to their equivalents in the independent documentary film tradition.

5.6 Documentary is dead, long live documentary

Despite documentary’s difficulties with television broadly and with factual TV specifically, the documentary genre has nevertheless continued to evolve outside the broadcast sphere, particularly outside of Britain. Since the turn of the millennium archaeological documentary films have continued to be made, although their impact is little felt and responded to by the archaeology community. Some of these films were created specifically for theatrical release but later picked up for broadcast – straddling the two media worlds, although even these tended to achieve only limited regional releases. Some have never been picked up for broadcast television at all. The fact that the directors of some of these films are also veterans of television, yet have intentionally selected cinematic documentary features as their medium of choice, can also be read as an indicator of cinema’s enduring appeal to film practitioners. The following selection of such films demonstrates just how differently cinematic documentary approaches and treats archaeology as a subject, in contrast to the Reithian or ratings-driven agenda of factual TV.

The clearest example of cinema trumping television is Werner Herzog’s sublime Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). The film was shot using 3D cameras specifically with the intention of replicating the experience of the caves within the cinema space by using 3D film projection (a clear example of technology in the service of poetic experimentation). As mentioned in Chapter Two, Cave of Forgotten Dreams was critically acclaimed, winning Best Nonfiction Film Awards at the 2011 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and Best Documentary at both the Washington and Los Angeles Film Critics Awards in 2011, respectively, to name a few. Intriguingly, Cave of Forgotten Dreams was licensed to and partially funded by History Channel, raising questions about how History’s commissioning

224 Chapter 5 strategy must operate, given its concurrent reliance on factual TV schedule fillers such as the archaeological quagmire Ancient Aliens (2009 - 2018).

Still 5.18: Women surveying and digging in search of the remains of their loved ones in the Atacama Desert, in Nostalgia de la Luz (2010). [Source: Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán (Reproduced with permission from Icarus Films © 2010)].

Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia for the Light, 2010) by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, is lyrical yet penetrating account of the lasting impact of the genocides committed by the Pinochet dictatorship, featuring both archaeology and archaeologists as key to the narrative, as well as community members conducting their own archaeological investigations (as in still 5.21). The film won numerous Best Documentary Awards including at the 2010 European Film Awards, and the 2011 Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival; Best Feature Film at the 2011 International Documentary Association; and received several Best Documentary nominations including at the 2013 Emmy Awards. Interestingly Guzman’s connection to archaeology additionally harks back to a factual TV series (5 x 30’) he directed for TVE about Mayan and Aztec culture called Pre-Columbian Mexico (Icarus Films 2010). Despite this, for his new enquiries into Chile’s ancient, modern, and indigenous pasts he chose cinematic documentary film.

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Still 5.19: Production still of co-directors Andrew Pike and Ann McGrath with National Parks Ranger Ernie Mitchell surveying at Lake Mungo, in Message from Mungo (2014) [Source: Message from Mungo (Reproduced with permission from Ronan Films © 2014)].

Message from Mungo (2014) is an Australian feature documentary by filmmaker Andrew Pike and historian Ann McGrath, exploring a controversial story of the repatriation of human remains and the relationship between archaeology and Aboriginal elders (see still 5.22) (Rogers 2015). Regrettably the film appears to have had a limited festival run and a limited release in 2015 on Australian broadcast television (ABC and NITV). In a similar vein, Indigenous perspectives on archaeology, tourism, modernity and cultural heritage are regularly foregrounded in short documentary films, such as the Rapa Nui language Amo (2018) by Max Lowe, although shorts such as this tend to be limited to festivals and online distribution are rarely broadcast.

Out of the Maya Tombs (2014) by US director David Lebrun, explored and critiqued archaeology’s complicity in the looting of Mayan vases (still 5.23). Like Guzmán, Lebrun too has also had his work broadcast on television, making archaeology documentary features which, after their festival runs, were adapted for television scheduling (Nightfire Films 2014).

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Still 5.20: Production still: David Lebrun filming interviews with former looters Jose Luis Morales and Ramon Peralta for Out of the Maya Tombs [Source: Out of the Maya Tombs (Reproduced with permission from Alan Barker/Nightfire Films © 2014)].

Other archaeology documentary films, despite critical acclaim, have never been broadcast on television. Agelastros Petra (Mourning Rock, 2000), takes an avant- garde approach to presenting Filippos Koutsaftis’ personal contemplation of the neglected ancient Greek archaeological site Eleusina and the community that remembers it, and lives by it.

Similarly, the Arabic-language film The Drift (2017) by Beirut-based British filmmaker Maeve Brennan, was commissioned by the Chisenhale art gallery in London, exhibited at documentary film festivals, and never broadcast (as shown in still 5.24). In the film, Brennan creates a portrait of the material past and its treatment in Lebanon and Syria, including gently critiquing archaeology’s role in the looting of sites and the antiquities trade.

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Still 5.21: The Drift by Maeve Brennan, installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, 2017 [Source: photo by Andy Keate (Reproduced with permission from Chisenhale Gallery © 2019)].

Das Grosse Museum (The Great Museum, 2014) by Austrian director Johannes Holzhausen, The New Rijksmuseum (2013) by Oeke Hoogendijk, and The First Monday in May (2016) by US director Andrew Rossi, are each cinéma vérité style documentaries that explore the institutional, social, and political characters of museums – including their archaeological collections and museum staff (still 5.25).

Still 5.22: Production still of the opening of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, from Das Grosse Museum (2014) [Source: Das Grosse Museum (Reproduced with permission from Navigator Films © 2014)].

Astonishingly no archaeology documentaries similar in style or content to these above examples have been made about archaeology in Britain – most have not even received a mention in English-language archaeological discourse. But while television broadcasters might not have picked up these works, perhaps judged

228 Chapter 5 too niche for broadcaster’s “broad public audiences”, new digital distribution platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have – thus providing a radical new alternative to bringing complex archaeological documentary storytelling directly to the filmmaker’s target audiences. Consequently for archaeology documentaries, as for documentary more widely, the potentials of digital distribution have completely revitalised the genre.

5.6.1 A digital renaissance

Starting in late 1970s, the introduction of digital camera recording and computer- based editing allowed a more open-ended and liberal approach to filmmaking, preservation, and distribution than previously possible. As the image and sound quality and memory capacity of hardware was continually improved upon, cameras became smaller, lighter, more affordable, and more adaptable to different filming scenarios. The mass-commercial introduction of wearable cameras such as GoPros in 2004 allowed new ways of capturing and experiencing action and personal perspectives on camera. Likewise drone filmmaking has largely supplanted the need for expensive outdoor cranes and their operating crews, reducing filmmaking budgets and footprints significantly. More recently, smartphones augmented with rigs, microphones, detachable lenses (old and new), and editing apps, and with the ability to post content straight to the web in real-time, have profoundly reconceptualised both filmmaking and dissemination (some like the 2018 Samsung Galaxy S9 and the 2016 Kodak Ektra are now even marketed as cameras first, phones second). Since the advent of digital video, cinéma vérité and obs-doc films shooting ratios exploded, from the celluloid- restricted 20:1 (20 hours of footage to 1 hour of edited film, such as in Waiting for Fidel 1974), to as much as 600:1 (e.g. 600:1 in Ukraine is not a Brothel 2013; and 500:1 in Cartel Land (Heineman Interview, SIDF 2018). For archaeology, this digital turn allowed filming and projects such those at Çatalhöyük to be undertaken with comparative ease, although like many digital documentarists, the researcher-filmmakers inevitably encountered the problem of collecting an over- abundance of film or video ‘data’, and difficulties in sharing and interpreting the material in a useful or meaningful way (see Chapter Two section 2.5.3). Arguably however, the most dramatic innovation that digital technologies really brought to filmmaking and to archaeology documentaries was not so much recording technologies, but the revolution of digital distribution.

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Large scale digital distribution of films in a digital video format was first undertaken illicitly via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing platforms via the internet, which began to appear between 1999 and 2002. Whilst many of these were shut down or restricted due to copyright infringement laws, some like The Pirate Bay (established in 2003) continue to flourish and have generated an international political movement: Pirate Parties International – lobbying for copyright reform, freedom of speech, and digital human rights (PPI 2019). The P2P platforms and the commercial (and political) threat they posed to the nationally regulated and regionally defined film and television industries has in turn revolutionised how filmmakers, broadcasters, and media companies conceive of and manage not only film and television distribution, but also production funding, content, content gathering, and audience engagement as well.

For documentary, this new digital nexus has inspired something of a renaissance for the genre: old documentaries are finding new audiences on video-on-demand (VOD) platforms such as Amazon, Netflix and Hulu,26 and new documentaries are beginning to be made specifically for online release. These digitally oriented productions are shedding television’s schedule-dependent and advertising- dictated formulas, to be reformulated for binge-watching across platform types (phone, laptop, digital television, cinema), at any time of day, at home or in public spaces, by both communal and solo viewers. Happily, documentary’s digital renaissance includes archaeology documentary feature films. Noteworthy works hosted on Amazon and Netflix at the time of writing include the aforementioned Nostalgia for the Light (2010), Atari: Game Over (2014), the maritime archaeology mockumentary Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2016), and of particular interest, Saving Mes Aynak (2014).

26 Tellingly, Netflix takes its name from and aligns itself with cinema rather than television: ‘Netflix’ plays on ‘Internet Flicks,’ ‘Flicks’ being an old-fashioned synonym for movies by invoking the flickering from cinematic projection. Meanwhile, Hulu takes its name from the Mandarin word hùlù (葫蘆), which means both “holder of precious things” and “interactive recording” (Kilar 2008). Like the Cinématographe then, these names have been carefully chosen to invoke a sense of both cinematic lineage and future.

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5.6.2 Brent Huffman and Saving Mes Aynak

Stills 5.23: Saving Mes Aynak production stills, some with social media branding. (Clockwise from top): archaeologists survey a stupa with Mes Aynak in the background; Temori at home with his son; Huffman preparing to film an interview with Temori on site; a Buddhist devotee statue salvaged from the excavation; one of the archaeology team shows how he is blind in one eye after surviving a Taliban land mine explosion on site [Source: Saving Mes Aynak website (Reproduced with permission, © Brent E. Huffman 2014)].

Saving Mes Aynak is an exemplary case in point of an archaeology documentary strategically designed to engage and recruit a deliberately cultivated digital

231 Chapter 5 audience, and turn that audience into proactive advocates for archaeology. Written, directed, filmed, and edited by US media academic and journalist Brent E. Huffman, Saving Mes Aynak is a cinéma vérité style documentary feature film. Huffman follows the story of Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori as he navigates not only the archaeology of an emerging site, but also a landscape of international and local politics, professional conflicts, and Taliban threats, in an endeavour to excavate and preserve the site of Mes Aynak. Huffman’s journalistic and vérité approach grants him access to the personal, social, and political realities in which the archaeological excavation takes place (as shown in stills 5.26).

Mes Aynak is an archaeological site on a hilltop 30km south of Kabul, that included the remains of a 5000-year-old Bronze Age site, and a 1500-year-old 4500m [square] Buddhist monastery complex. In the 1990s the site also served as an Al-Qaida training camp, and has long been subject to looting as well as Taliban rocket launcher and landmine attacks (Lawler 2010b, 2011, 2012). The chief danger to Mes Aynak at the time of writing, however, was the threat of developer-led demolition. The site is positioned directly on top of a copper deposit valued at US $100 billion, which since 2008 has been leased by the Afghan government to a Chinese state-owned mining company, China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC). Plans to begin mining have been stalled while the salvage archaeology excavation continues (indefinitely), and until plans to compensate and resettle two villages within the designated development zone are finalised.

Saving Mes Aynak was critically acclaimed, winning an honorary award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (2015), as well as earning multiple awards at archaeology film festivals internationally between 2015 and 2017 (discussed later in this chapter). It easily meets all four of Nichols’ criteria for documentary status, but for our interests it was Huffman and his team’s wider strategy – of which the film was merely the frontispiece – that is of interest. By adopting a digital fundraising and distribution strategy Saving Mes Aynak’s creators not only sought to promote the documentary film, but they also launched an international social justice campaign for the archaeology site’s preservation.

The seeds of Saving Mes Aynak first appeared publicly in short film format as part of a New York Times ‘Op-doc’ online video and news article, both authored by Huffman (Huffman 2013). Capitalising on the interest the story garnered,

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Huffman and his team then took full advantage of the internet’s capacity to connect and motivate people to action. As well as the usual cobbling together of funding via film grants and production company support from Kartemquin, the documentary was also financed by individual donations made using the crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter. Through this campaign over 300 donors from 46 countries provided US $35,000 to fund the film’s production, with 10% of the funds raised dedicated to the Afghan archaeology team’s equipment budget (Huffman 2012).

In 2014 Saving Mes Aynak entered the international film festival circuit by premiering at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), then competing at other prestigious documentary festivals, before securing broadcast on television channels including Al Jazeera English (Qatar), Al Jazeera America (USA), Buddhist True Network (South Korea), NHK (Japan), Schweizer Radio and Fernsehen (Switzerland), RTL Television (Germany), Klassik TV (Croatia), Histoire (France), GEO (Germany), and TOLO Afghan TV. The filmmakers, working with Kartemquin, sold copies of the DVD via their own website and on Amazon, and hosted it to stream or rent on iTunes and Google Play, and later US Netflix (in 2017), whilst also making the film free to access from any Afghani ISP address (Kartemquin 2014).

What is particularly impressive about Saving Mes Aynak’s digital crowdfunding campaign was not merely the capacity to finance the film, but to build an engaged community around the film by turning prospective audience members into investors and advocates. After the initial circuit of festival screenings and broadcasting of Saving Mes Aynak, the film’s production company Kartemquin, working as a non-profit organisation in partnership with the Association for the Protection of Afghan Archaeology, ran a second crowdfunding campaign using Indiegogo (Kartemquin 2015), raising US $29,247.27 The filmmakers pledged the funds would go towards maintaining an awareness building campaign structured around screening events and social media outreach.28 The filmmakers directed audience involvement toward activism activities, such as the signing of an ongoing online petition that to date has attracted over 88000 signatories, for presentation to the Afghan president Ashrav Ghani Ahmadzai (Kartemquin 2014).

27 Again, 10% of the Indiegogo funds were pledged to fund computing and photography equipment for the archaeologists. 28 Using the hashtag #SaveMesAynak across social media platforms.

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Screening events included over 60 film festival screenings, over 100 university and community screenings, and over 30 policy screenings and talks, including with the US State Department, the Afghan Ministry of Culture, the Smithsonian Museum, the MacArthur Foundation, the Global Heritage Fund (Kartemquin 2014). This campaign of community building and activism also engaged with various international archaeology events and film festivals, such as the Arkhaios Cultural Heritage and Archaeology Film Festival, at Hilton Head Island in the USA (2015); the Archaeology Channel International Film and Video Festival, in Eugene in the USA (2015); the International Festival of Archaeological Film of Bidasoa in Spain (2016); ICRONOS International Festival of Archaeological Films in Bordeaux in France (2016); the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference in Southampton UK

(2016); the 10th AGON International Meeting of Archaeology Films in Athens in Greece (2016); the International Archaeology Film Festival of Ressegna in Italy (2017); and the Verde Valley Archaeology Centre International Archaeology Film Festival in Camp Verde in the USA (2018). According to the Blueshift/Kartemquin impact report (2018), one of the outcomes of these screenings was the partnering of the US State Department, the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and Afghan Institute of Archaeology to co-create a joint database of Afghani archaeological heritage sites and their status of preservation, cataloguing of Buddhist and Kandahar art found at Mes Aynak and elsewhere, and training of young Afghani archaeologists in field archaeology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) surveying.

The radical open-access ethos and director-led approach to distributing Saving Mes Aynak show how the filmmakers have taken every opportunity to connect with a wide range of audiences – reaching across language barriers, industry regions, public and professional spheres, and over an extensive time period. Such an audience reach would never have been possible if the documentary had been solely reliant on restrictive regional broadcast licenses. In fact, given the risks involved in production Saving Mes Aynak would likely never have been commissioned in a television context. Nichols’ acclamation of independent documentary’s rejection of corporate media as an endeavour “to speak truth to power rather than embrace it” (2017: 4), springs to mind:

“In a time when the major media recycle the same stories on the same subjects over and over, when they risk little in formal innovation, when they remain beholden to powerful sponsors with their own political agendas and restrictive demands, it is the independent documentary film

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that has brought a fresh eye to the events of the world and has told stories, with verve and imagination, that broaden horizons and awaken new possibilities.” (Nichols 2017: 1).

Ultimately, Saving Mes Aynak is the anti-thesis of Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki and the media strategy in which his 1950 film operated. In stark contrast, Saving Mes Aynak is documentary filmmaking very much in the service of both the endangered archaeological record and a local, vulnerable, stakeholder community – rather than in the service of the personal agenda of an already empowered, elite, individual archaeologist seeking only to impose his own view of the world upon it.

The real-world impact of Saving Mes Aynak in achieving its end goal or preservation however, is difficult to determine. Certainly, at the time of writing Mes Aynak was still undergoing salvage excavation (MENAFN 2019). But the joint database, cataloguing, and training initiatives proposed above appear to have been discontinued, the international news media has since lost interest in a story that has failed to progress, and the site is still scheduled to be mined by MCC when the excavation ends (Zeyaratjaye 2018). Other than the featuring of Qadir Temori in the original film the voices of Afghan archaeologists have remained largely mute on the issue, and according to Huffman although the Afghans were very supportive of the film project, the French archaeologists involved in the excavation were uncooperative, and the US archaeologists working for the US embassy in Afghanistan were banned from talking to him (Newby 2015). Huffman himself has also expressed concern that by bringing international attention to the site his film might have inadvertently played a role in the increase of looting that occurred in 2015 (Newby 2015). Additionally, the deaths of Abdul Wahub Ferozi, one of the archaeologists, as well as two of the field labourers and one of the drivers working at Mes Aynak – all were killed by a roadside bomb in June 2018 – has renewed broader concerns about security and sustainability for the archaeological project to continue at all (Sediqi 2018). With these events in mind, it could be argued that the film has failed to meet its ambitious goal of promoting and securing the site’s preservation and archaeological study.

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5.6.3 Beyond the gimmick: archaeology storytelling becomes interactive

The advent of digital filmmaking and distribution has also opened pathways for archaeology documentaries to adopt emergent storytelling platforms and technologies. Interactive documentaries (iDocs) include Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), 360˚ documentaries, web-based documentaries (web-docs), site-specific installations, and cross-platform works are all flourishing media offering new potentialities – and risks – to the documentary genre.

Archaeology has embraced these technologies wholeheartedly, and every year there are more and more interactive archaeology ‘games’ or tours which immerse participants in real or reconstructed places, or allow participants to interact with archaeological objects. Examples include Civilizations AR (a spin-off of the factual TV series, BBC, 2017), Lascaux (2009), Temples of Cambodia (2017), The Cave (2017), Kildalton Chapel Reconstruction (2017), Underworld: A Virtual Exploration of Subterranean London (2016); Bikini Atoll (2015)29, the Invincible Wreck Web Tour (2017) and the Thistlegorm Project (2017). Regrettably however these works lack the crucial elements of rhetorical address and narrative storytelling to qualify as documentaries.

There are however, genuine interactive documentaries (iDocs) that feature archaeology and/or archaeological epistemologies, recent examples being the cross platform Nepalese black-market exposé The Great Plunder (2018; 2019), and the iDoc Saydnaya, which uses oral histories, architecture, and archaeological methods to digitally reconstruct and explore the Syrian prison of the same name (Weizman 2018). One production particularly noteworthy for how technology is used to serve storytelling (rather than merely host it), is Al Jazeera’s Palestine Remix (2015). Palestine Remix allows participants to watch, re-cut, and share their own versions of previously broadcast Al Jazeera-owned documentaries, including several pertaining to occupied, destroyed, or at-risk Palestinian archaeological sites, reported within the social, political, and economic contexts of their preservation (stills 5.27 show the introduction page and interface mid-edit). In this way the audience or ‘user’ is literally turned into the ‘author’ of the new stories.30

29 Bikini Atoll (2015) was later recut into Atomic Ghost Fleet (2017), which at the time of writing I have not had the technology to assess, but the trailer has documentary promise. 30 It should be noted that in contrast to the remixing discussed in the literature review, Palestine Remix only allows users to remix filmed material already made public, and for

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Still 5.24: Web interface of Palestine Remix: (top) title page exhibiting the range of documentary sources available to edit; and (bottom) platform for editing via cutting and pasting the spoken transcript [Source: Al Jazeera 2015].

Another iDoc worthy of mention is In Limbo (2014) by Antoine Viviani of MIT, which adopts a media-archaeology approach to tell a story “from the point of view of the data that will outlive us all” (Viviani 2014). In Limbo (which accompanies a 90-minute feature film), works by harvesting – with permission – your email, social media, and publicly available data, as well as accessing your webcam and current geolocation, then curates and augments this data into a 30-minute montage about the future of global human data, following your own digital ghost, based on the digital human remains you will leave behind (see still 5.28).

which participants would likely have either signed an industry standard release form (for worldwide/in perpetuity use), or which meets the conditions of ‘public’s right to know.’

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Still 5.25: Production still from In Limbo, showing interview segment with computer pioneer Gordon Bell (2015) [Source: In Limbo (Reproduced with permission © Antoine Viviani/Providences Films 2015).

Such non-linear filmic formats are radically blurring documentary’s boundaries in terms of not only technology but also the content, authorship, and ethics of storytelling. They challenge Nichols’ criteria for documentary status and in doing so problematise the genre’s very definition (for further discussions of whether these even are documentary or should be considered a new art form, see Aston et al. 2017; Aufderheide 2015). Practitioners and scholars alike are beginning to question how one of the defining features of documentary – authorship, so commonly grounded in rhetorical address – should be ascribed when documentary content is crowdsourced such as in The Quipo Project (Court and Lerner 2015), or when users’ personal data – even bodily and emotional data – is mined and incorporated into the documentary form, as in Digital Me (Gaudenzi and Robbins 2015) and Do Not Track (Gaylor 2015), or when computer algorithms are responsible for unique one-off versions of stories (see Hight 2017; Moskowitz 2017; Uricchio 2017). That said, however, returning to the aspirations of avant-garde and observational filmmakers, documentary can now be said to be a ‘slave to content’ rather than to medium, form, or format. Such interactive productions also offer possible answers to calls by archaeologists seeking to find ways for digital technologies to overturn archaeology’s hierarchies of knowledge creation, and instead cultivate new modes of production and engagement for archaeological storytelling (see Shanks regarding iterative agile design, 2007).

The risk now, as highlighted by Urrichio (2017), is that the market behind these new technologies is more interested in pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the technologies, and less concerned with addressing problems of

238 Chapter 5 truth, representation, agency, access, or ethics across these new media. These young industries are also yet to stabilize adequate funding sources or reliable software platforms to be able to compete with the film and television industries, and with costs extending up to £ 100,000 to produce a single work, productions remain dependent upon corporate sponsorship (although as we have seen, this is nothing new for documentary) (Hight 2017: 89; Moskowitz 2017: 172, 174). Furthermore, the audience reach and depth of engagement iDocs carry is questionable: web-doc users appear to spend only short periods committed to the sites (as little as 2.5 minutes); and as for AR, VR, and 360˚ works, these can be experienced only by single-viewer or small audiences, and are still largely restricted to touring schools, universities, festivals, galleries, and special events (Aufderheide 2015: 77). In many ways then, the landscape for these new media is akin to that of the travelling showmen of early cinema – and all the economic, legal, technological, artistic, and economic challenges they faced. As the new interactive documentary field continues to experiment and evolve, it is up to archaeologists to stay abreast of this discourse and act judiciously as to what we expect from and what depth we engage with these emergent documentary media.

5.7 Digital futures and the archaeology documentary

Let us end this history as we began it. Both new and old documentaries, as well as unedited footage and other non-fiction works all featuring archaeology are increasingly being digitised, and of those, some are also made accessible online. Almost of the films discussed in detail in these two historical chapters were accessed digitally – in all likelihood it was this sudden proliferation of digital preservation and accessibility that has not only allowed for this research to be undertaken, but was likely the reason a comprehensive study of archaeology in non-fiction film and documentary was absent until now. Les Pyramides (1897), once more, serves as a case in point.

I first watched Les Pyramides in 2017 via YouTube, on my 2014 Apple Mac Book Pro: a small 13” screen (considered high definition at the time of writing). As the film is now free of copyright restrictions, copies abound across a range online video platforms. I watched Les Pyramides alone, studying it closely, able to pause it, increase its size to fill my screen, playing it over and over. In this way, I was able to notice a subtle movement before the procession crosses the audiences’ view: in the left bottom corner, dwarfed beneath the Sphinx’s body, the last camel rider of the procession can be seen waiting for his turn to proceed. Evidently

239 Chapter 5 then, as for other Lumière films, Les Pyramides was likely staged for the camera. During a redraft of this chapter I also later found another higher quality version of the film online which confirmed my “discovery” of the last cameleer and therefore the film’s staging. Unexpectedly – and movingly – the hazy indistinguishable black silhouettes transformed into recognizable faces, smiling and laughing as they passed the camera, giving a completely different mood to the film (as shown by stills 5.29). The higher resolution version reminded me that like many viewers today, I have experienced most of the films in these chapters in a much lower quality that the original celluloid versions, and therefore had a very different visual experience to that had by the original audiences – one which not only altered the cinematic effect of the films, but also potentially caused me to miss information that might allow a closer study of production conditions, people involved, and archaeological details. This is a timely reminder then, that for us to discover what research potential these films can really offer us as historians and archaeologists, that if possible, they should be experienced in their original celluloid format and ideally cinema conditions, with the understanding that digital copies are just that – copies.

Nonetheless, it is thanks to digital technology that I was able to access and watch Les Pyramides at all, many times over, and on many devices: in a busy shared office, in the library, at the desk in the corner of my bedroom, on my iPhone. 120 years after it was first released I experienced this film31 in ways its makers and those captured within it could never have imagined. What is more, I have categorised it within an archaeology documentary canon – a fledging profession and film genre, neither of which existed in the time when Les Pyramides makers and target audiences experienced it. Now digital, these films will outlive this thesis, these words, myself, you the reader, and perhaps even the genre of documentary and the discipline of archaeology. As Grierson put it, they will “go on their way”. All of the films and documentaries mentioned in these two chapters – and those I have missed, or those yet to be made – are subject to a digital afterlife. They can be stored, restored, re-cut, re-purposed, manipulated, made 3D, made into a ‘flat’ single still image (see still 5.30), made into anything and to mean anything by filmmakers, audiences, and now even re-edited into new works by computing algorithms. They can be shared across so many servers around the world that it seems almost impossible that they could ever be

31 Although it was technically in digital video format, ‘video’ does not seem an appropriate term for what was so long a celluloid film.

240 Chapter 5 completely lost again. As playback technology improves we can find new archaeological details documented within them, like Tutankhamun’s boyhood chair, or the state of preservation of Stonehenge, Windmill Hill, Moai, or Mes Aynak – each frozen at particular points in time.

Stills 5.26: Comparison of Les Pyramides (1897) as experienced by viewers today, most commonly on YouTube and Critical Commons (left), and less known, but better quality, on Catalogue Lumière and Wikimedia Commons (right). The celluloid version no doubt preserves an even better visual record [Source: Les Pyramides on YouTube and Wikimedia Commons (PDM)].

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Still 5.27: Digital panoramic image created in 2018 by James Miles from the original Stonehenge – Panorama (1901) (Compare with Still 4.5, Still 4.6, and Still 4.7) [Source: James Miles (Reproduced with permission of James Miles 2019].

In more ways than I can prescribe, these digital innovations promise new and encouraging opportunities for archaeology and the documentary genre more broadly. As Aufderheide posits, each new technological development invests documentary with more value, and makes it possible to imagine the genre on an increasingly wider continuum of indexicality (2007: 125). As these films are digitally transformed they gain a deeper kind of timelessness. The obscurity and apparent naïveté of earlier works falls away, and they can be appreciated as technologically, culturally, and aesthetically innovative and dynamic in their own right (Michelakis and Wyle 2013: 15).

I have shown how Les Pyramids (1897), Stonehenge Panorama (1901), L’Île de Pâques (1935), Burton and Keiller's various works, Kon-Tiki (1950), all the way through to Saving Mes Aynak (2015), are all – still – dynamic and relevant archaeological films productions. Factual TV too, for all its perceived shortcomings, deserves recognition in this regard as well. For example, Rachel Perkins, director of the Australian television archaeology series First Australians (2008), has donated 500 hours of documentary interview footage with her participants to be digitally archived for community and research purposes by the Australian Institute of Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal Studies organization – a profoundly important heritage and archaeological resource (Wiltshire 2017: 292).

Yet there are risks that accompany this growing plethora of digital filmmaking, distribution, and archiving. The technologies of film as produced and distributed online – particularly immersive and interactive works – is advancing quicker than scholarship, legislation, and even the market can keep up with. By 2016, there was an estimated average of over four hundred hours of content uploaded to

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YouTube every minute (Statistica 2015, quoted in Moskowitz 2017: 172). For archaeology, this increase in content and greater ease of access to filming and distribution technologies has led to an abundance of diverse modes of online videos. Many of these are respectable attempts to present archaeology in considered, creative, and thoughtful ways, including community archaeology videos such as Hoa Hakananai‘a: There and Back Again (Terevaka Archaeological Outreach 2009), SCAPE Archaeology (SCAPE 2017-current), and Operation Nightingale: Time Warriors (Wessex Archaeology/Salisbury Arts Centre 2012); as well as archaeologist-made social media video series such as YouTuber Rachelamun (2016-current) and twitter video series @DurotrigesDiaries (Bournemouth University 2017-current). However, these are also vastly outweighed by the many more archaeologically-themed videos with far more nebulous agendas, namely as those promoting alien, racist, and political conspiracy videos (for examples, just filter YouTube results for ‘archaeology’ by ‘view count’). Additionally, as Aufderheide asks incisively:

“When political operatives, fourth graders, and product marketers all make downloadable documentaries, will we redraw the parameters around what we mean by “documentary”?” (2007: 127).

Certainly, many of these more dubious works are received by some online audiences as valid documentaries. They remind us then, that increased ease in accessing, producing, and distributing video has not solved archaeology’s long- held tensions regarding misrepresentation, accuracy, and truthfulness. In fact, if anything, digital platforms that foster online echo-chambers – to whatever purpose (including within archaeological spheres) – can merely amplify problems of truth and representation.

Stepping back to take an even broader perspective: the networking technology company CISCO predicts that by 2021 video traffic will account for 82% of all consumer internet traffic, and of this, smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic by 2021 (33% and 25% of traffic respectively), and there will be 3.5 networked devices per person, on global scale (CISCO 2017: 2). Video is rapidly replacing static images and text as one of the prime media of human communication. And as users navigate digital spaces from social media to VODs to news media, those platforms and their partners shape and manipulate users’ media diets by harvesting personal data, trading and selling it, and feeding it back with filtered video suggestions, search results, advertisements, and political incentives (such as the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal; see also Moskowitz 2017: 172). In this

243 Chapter 5 way, it is through this explosion of online video consumption that each and every viewer is cast not only as a monetised commodity in and of themselves, but as political instruments as well – regardless of the quality of the content they watch, and regardless of viewer consent.

For archaeology, particularly in Britain, unless we stop and take critical account of how our discipline interacts with film and television genres, formats, and technologies – of which documentary is but one – we risk repeating the same mistakes we have made previously. Key among these is how British archaeology embraced the edutainment philosophy of factual TV, at the expense of authored, critical, socially, and politically independent documentary film productions. Currently, British archaeology appears to be on track to continue its preference for factual TV over documentary, even in the field of interactive technologies, pursuing tours and procedural games rather than socially embedded digital documentary storytelling.

5.8 Concluding thoughts

In this historical account I have demonstrated that there is no distinct ‘archaeology documentary’ sub-genre, nor is it medium-specific, as has previously been assumed. Instead, I have reframed the definition of ‘archaeology documentary’ as ‘documentaries about archaeology’: they must be documentaries first and foremost, as discernible by following documentary conventions, for example by following Nichols’ criteria (as a suggested initial framework). They must also take as their subject questions about humanity’s material past and/or its study through archaeology. In keeping with the existing categories and terminology of the scholars and practitioners of documentary filmmaking, I have presented an array of archaeology documentaries that occur across the entire spectrum of documentary modes and media, from cinéma vérité 16-mm films made during the 1930s through to web-based multi-linear iDocs in the 2010s.

With this clearer view of the full scope of archaeology documentary filmmaking, and through close readings of specific case studies, it is evident that the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking is one distinguished not merely by tension or misrepresentation, but equally by goodwill and shared goals and benefits between archaeologists and filmmakers, broadcasters, and programmers. The commonly shared aspiration of educating public audiences about archaeology was not only a mutually held interest

244 Chapter 5 between factual TV and archaeology, but has proved so influential that for a long period it has motivated archaeologists to embrace factual TV formats to the exclusion of documentary, a decision which has had a profound impact on both sectors. I have also touched upon how there has undeniably been a financial relationship between the two sectors which has spanned across media and benefited some archaeological research and teaching (a finding that corroborates survey respondents’ accounts regarding factual TV funding, see 3.3.2).

Perhaps most importantly, beginning with the earliest experiments of non-fiction filmmaking through to the digital era, I have demonstrated how some archaeologists managed to achieve a high degree of agency in the production of films and documentaries, working as script writers, camera-crew, editors, presenters, and producers. Yet I have also shown the changing nature of archaeological agency in filmmaking across time, from Laverchery’s co-authoring of L’Île de Pâques, through Heyerdahl and Daniel’s masterful cross-media strategies with documentaries at their core, to archaeologists’ coming to spend more time in front of the camera instead of taking more powerful roles behind it, as in factual TV, and finally to our increasing disengagement from the documentary genre and it’s new digital modes in the 21st century. Thus, while it is indisputable that archaeologists have always been filmmakers and media-makers in our own right within documentary productions, with more potential agency than we realise, we appear to have discarded this type of authorship in our pursuit of audience reach, ratings, and the benefits of via factual TV.

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Chapter 6

Chapter 6 Autoethnography

I once asked Akira Kurusawa why he had chosen to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he’d panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he’d panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport – neither of which belonged in a period movie. Only the person who’s made the movie knows what goes into the decisions that result in any piece of work. They can be anything from budget requirements to divine inspiration.

Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (1995: 1).

6.1 Introduction

In this thesis I have reviewed the archaeological literature relating to non-fiction and documentary filmmaking including archaeologists’ first-hand accounts of their own filmmaking projects, surveyed archaeologists about their experiences of documentary and factual TV, and explored the historical record of archaeological filmmaking. Gradually a clearer perspective of archaeology’s relationship to documentary filming is coming into view. However, one crucial aspect remains missing: the perspective of a documentary filmmaker on the process of documenting archaeology on film.

On a general level, documentary filmmaking as a practical process, including its theoretical and ethical dimensions, can be readily studied through introductory textbooks, interviews with filmmakers, and the rare memoir (e.g. Ivens 1969; Stubbs 2002; Renov 2004; Rosenthal and Corner 2005; Aufderheide 2007; Spence and Navarro 2011; Nichols 2010, 2017; Winston 2008, 2017a). More in- depth and critical studies via interview series and surveys of documentary practitioners have begun to problematise the ethical and practical complexities of filmmaking as well (see Aufderheide et al. 2009; Borum Chattoo and Harder 2018; Whicker’s et al. 2017; 2019). These accounts however are restricted in depth and scope due to wariness on the filmmakers’ side (even when anonymised), the pressure of confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements, and an understandable inclination towards professional discretion (Aufderheide et al. 2009: 20). The result of this is that there is yet to be an established discursive space where filmmakers feel safe to air and find solutions to the issues that arise during production, including concerns about truthfulness, representation, ethical

247 Chapter 6 dilemmas, pay and conditions, technology, and the risks of exploitation (of participants, filmmakers, audiences, etc). Consequently, there also remains no comprehensive body of evidence to investigate patterns of process, behaviour, values, attitudes, or ethical standards across the documentary industry – yet.

Two doctoral studies have bravely delved deeper than this, offering documentary case studies for critique. Australian documentary filmmaker Stephen Thomas examined the agency of documentary participants in his film’s portrayal of survivors of Australia’s asylum seeker detention centres, by providing a self- reflexive analysis of his own filmmaking process during his multi-film project Freedom Stories (Thomas 2017). British documentarist Agnieszka Piotrowska (2014) also investigated the ethics of documentary filmmaking by combining psychoanalytical textual analysis of two documentary films (Shoah 1985, and Camera Bluff 1979), complemented by an auto-ethnographic account of her own filmmaking practice, based on her own production diary of her film The Conman with 14 Wives (2006). Following then in the steps of Thomas and Piotrowska’s pioneering research, and bringing this discourse in to archaeology, this chapter presents an autoethnographic account of my own attempt to produce an archaeology documentary film. Critically, this account combines both archaeological and documentarist perspectives, thereby bridging the gap between the two fields.

6.2 Case study design and method of analysis

This case study was designed with the following specific aims and objectives:

6.2.1 Case study aims

1. To better define what an ‘archaeology documentary’ is. 2. To generate in-depth grounded evidence towards demystifying the documentary filmmaking process and monolithic notion of the ‘mass media’. 3. To introduce a filmmaker’s perspective to the discussion and thereby open new avenues of enquiry. 4. To assess filmmaking as an archaeological activity and a way of crafting archaeological knowledge. 5. To identify the themes, issues and concerns shared by archaeologists and other stakeholders in relation to archaeology documentary filmmaking.

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6. To advance the discourse beyond anxieties of representation towards instead addressing philosophical questions of truth, power, authorship, ownership, agency, and aesthetics.

6.2.2 Case study objectives

1. To carry out a participant-observation-based autoethnography of documentary productions from the perspective of a ‘filmmaker- archaeologist’, using a regularly kept field/production diary, supplemented with film editing records and documentary evidence (productions notes, email correspondence, etc.). 2. To present an accessible written auto-ethnographic account of said production, combining ‘thick’ description and thematic analysis of the processes, relationships, issues, and tensions encountered during archaeology documentary filmmaking. 3. To use this account to identify significant themes, issues and patterns that occur in the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. 4. To critically compare the case study findings with other sources of relevant information (survey data, similar research).

6.2.3 From ethnography to autoethnography

My original approach to this case study was ethnographic, combining participant observation with interview research, and following the guidance of ethnography scholars (Geertz 1973; Burgess 1984; Spradley 1979, 1980; Jorgensen 1989; Brinkmann and Kvale 2015), and influenced by previous applications of ethnography to archaeological practice (Goodwin 1994; Gero 1996; Edgeworth 2003; Zorzin 2010, 2013, 2014; Everill 2006; 2012). However, when I observed from first-hand experience how isolating and subjective parts of the filmmaking process and experience can be, I realised I would need to change to an autoethnographic approach. Through this I would be able to more fully and meaningfully represent the realities of documentary filmmaking in an archaeological context.

In comparison to other fields archaeology has been slow to openly adopt autoethnography, and only a few works have explicitly named and employed the method, usually in order to question and explore their personal reflections on the place and purpose of archaeology in society. The first, by Yvonne Marshall, Sasha

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Roseneil, and Kayt Armstrong, tells a shared collaborative feminist narrative of the excavation of the British Cold-War era Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (2009). In another, archaeologist Steve Brown investigates the archaeology of his own Sydney home as “a community of entangled things” (2016). More recently, bio-archaeologist Heather Robertson uses autoethnography to examine the experience of repatriating First Nations ancestral human remains in British Columbia from her perspective as scientist and colonizer (2018). These works provide grounding for more autoethnographies of archaeology to be undertaken.

Another study which particularly resonates with my own is Paul Everill’s examination of UK commercial archaeological attitudes and working conditions, which took a sharply personal turn when he experienced an injury on site and decided to include it in his account. Although Everill characterised his approach as ethnographic in practice it arguably evolved to become autoethnographic, as he alludes:

…in attempting to observe the people and situations around me this study has, by its nature, almost become about my perceptions and myself. Rather than being an objective observer, I became the medium, the “main instrument” (Burgess 1984: 79), through which other people were described and events reported. (2012: 146)

By embracing a more personalised approach Everill was able to identify and critique subtle aspects of archaeological culture, including the “invisibility” of workers in the archaeological knowledge-making process, the importance of on- site friendships, the impact of archaeological hierarchies, the nature of health and safety incidents and their impact, as well as archaeologists’ poor conditions of employment, and other pros and cons of archaeological working environment (2012: 136).

Likewise, it was only by embracing a subjective and personal account of filmmaking that Piotrowska was able to document and explore themes of gender, feminism, capitalism, power, reception theory, politics, and technology, and to examine how these characterise the ethical parameters of the documentary encounter. Piotrowska concluded her study by boldly redefining documentary practice as a site of “transference love”: a psychoanalytical term for an unconscious desire of the other in oneself (2014: 193).

Piotrowska makes a convincing argument that through careful privileging of a single individual’s voice, autoethnography can move beyond the limitations of

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‘reflexivity’ to plug the gap between practice-based experience, and academic research and theory generation:

…including one’s personal experience in a highly scholarly discourse is sometimes the only way in which to include the vital ‘missing story’ in the otherwise more traditional academic presentation (Muncey 2-10:6). At the heart of auto-ethnography lies a conviction that every individual’s personal experience has something unique to contribute (Piotrowska 2014: 16).

In essence, autoethnography is “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).” (Ellis et. al. 2011: 1). As a qualitative method it was increasingly embraced by researchers in disciplines such as health sciences, social sciences, and performance studies, as a way to document and explore subjective but culturally relevant phenomena, particularly those experiences “shrouded in silence”, highly charged, or requiring empathy, such as studies of illness, bereavement, criminology, and identity politics (Ellis et. al. 2011: 3; Denshire 2013; Hogan 2013; Short et al. 2013; Winkler 2018). It is an approach that accepts subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s authorial voice and personal influence on the research.

Defined as being both process and product at once, there is no prescriptive method or style of writing in autoethnography, although most are written as first person narratives. They can be conveyed as essays, short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, scripts, journals, blogs, performances, discipline- specific prose, experimental writing, or a combination of these forms (Ellis 2004: 38). What unites autoethnographies is the shared goal of providing new, even destabilizing insight into a cultural phenomenon by immersing the reader in the author’s direct experience of and perspective of that phenomenon. This is achieved by using storytelling rich with evocative, accessible, and aesthetic, thick description to illustrate and analyse aspects of cultural experience, often accompanied by comparative analysis against other existing research (Ellis and Bochner 2000; Ellis et. al. 2011; Hogan 2013).

Thus, autoethnography is apropos for my purposes for three reasons: firstly, out of necessity, as much of the solo-shooting and editing process was conducted by myself in isolation, so as the filmmaker my own experience and work is unavoidably the phenomenon under study, the “missing story” so to speak (after

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Muncey 2010, quoted in Piotrowska 2014: 108). Secondly, autoethnography is an ideal form of writing to immerse archaeologists into a filmmaker’s perspective, so they might (to borrow from Shakespeare) see feelingly the processes, dilemmas, and contradictions of filmmaking within an archaeological context. And finally, the fact that the autoethnographic instinct for socially just and socially conscious writing which privileges “truthfulness” over “accuracy”, and that authors are often motivated to share their experiences as a way to speak out for others experiencing the same phenomena (Ellis et. al. 2011; Ellis 2004: 33), seems to me a fitting form of literature for exploring the similarly motivated documentary filmmaking impulse. The form of autoethnography I have used is what Ellis terms a layered account, with aspects of personal narrative (et al. 2011: 20, 24), which is to say I combine and contrast multiple authorial voices, vignettes, reflexivity, data, and parallel studies in the course of sharing my personal experiences and perspective.

6.2.4 Case study scope

The perspective that I can provide on the subject of archaeology documentary filmmaking is admittedly a modest one: I am an early careerist in both archaeology and documentary filmmaking, so my view is therefore restricted to someone who is starting out in both sectors. Likewise, as this was a not-for-profit film intended for free online release (as 61% of professional UK documentarists do, according to Whicker’s 2019: 6), this case study was largely free from and does not seek to examine the conditions of filmmaking determined by either broadcasting or festival markets (instead see Thomas 2017; Marilyn Gaunt, in Piotrowska 2014: 197). Instead this autoethnography focuses on the embodied and craft processes, practicalities, and personal aspects of documentary filmmaking in a specific archaeological context: a field-school in the UK. As such, the following account will likely offer little that is new (or news) to experienced documentary filmmakers beyond insights into filming in an archaeological environment. However, I hope it will be of benefit to beginner filmmakers, and particularly to archaeologists seeking to pick up the camera and experiment with different non-fiction filmmaking modes, or those seeking to collaborate across the two sectors.

Although I address ethical concerns briefly at the end of this case study, given the exploratory nature of this thesis and my initial aim of demystifying the process of documentary filmmaking for archaeologists, an in-depth examination of the

252 Chapter 6 ethics of documentary filmmaking in an archaeological context falls outside the remit of this thesis, and I respectfully leave the subject to future research.1

Regarding some of the more fraught aspects of the archaeology-filmmaking relationship described in the following account, I urge readers to view this piece of writing as a critique of archaeological culture and not of individuals. Again, I stress that as an autoethnography this account is explicitly written from my perspective as a filmmaker, archaeologist, student, woman, and early career scholar, and this view is all I seek to represent here. I hope I have told this story in such a way that readers can understand and contextualise not only my experience, but my participants as well. I invite readers to read and reflect with honesty and compassion about what the story shared here means for archaeology on a cultural level, and as a discipline.

6.2.5 Method of case study data collection

In the course of data collection I alternated between the role of filmmaker and the role of ethnographic researcher. My filmmaking tasks encompassed researching, writing, cinematography, sound-recording, data wrangling, editing, directing, and producing the archaeology documentary. Such multi-tasking is increasingly common in documentary filmmaking (Whicker’s et al. 2017: 2). For each day of production and regularly during editing and post-production I would record in both short-form (hand-written in a pocket-diary for when out in the field), and extended accounts (typed up at the end of each day), a written description of my observations and reflections upon the process of filmmaking, logistical challenges, my interactions with film participants, idea and story development, ethical dilemas, and my thoughts on the positive and negative aspects of filmmaking on an archaeology project. These records were therefore made within hours of events occurring, and where possible relevant conversations were recorded as close to verbatim as possible. In total I documented 49 extended- account diary entries, totalling an 11-month long ethnographic account comprising over 80,000 words, covering late pre-production through to the completion of the film edit. In writing the autoethnography, I used the full ethnographic account as my primary source material, fact-checking this against production documents, emails with correspondents, social media records, screenshots of the editing process, and the original 65+ hours of film footage

1 Perhaps coming soon to a screen near you: Off The Record 2: The Sequel.

253 Chapter 6 captured during filming (although in keeping with anonymisation these materials are not included in this thesis, save for some partly-obscured screenshots to demonstrate process).

6.2.6 Case study ethics, anonymisation, and data protection

This case study was granted ethics approval by the University of Southampton Humanities Ethics Committee prior to commencement (no. 20228), and all research participants gave their written consent to participate prior to taking part in the study. Research details and contacts were also available via the research project website.2 During the film’s editing process and after seeking ethics counsel, I decided the research would be better represented as an autoethnography with participant details anonymised, and the archaeology project and its details pseudonymised. I updated my participants about this, they agreed to these changes, and I updated the research project website accordingly.

Relational ethics (how the research treats their participants and audiences) are a key issue in autoethnography. To safeguard participants in writing this autoethnography I have pseudonymised participant details, in some instances I have used composite characters to protect identities, and I have obscured distinguishable information about individuals, organisations, places, the excavation and its findings. That said, I reiterate to make clear that I am not seeking to represent their views here. Rather, following Turner’s problematisation of the ethics of autoethnography, I maintain that the only perspective I am representing here is my own, so that even when I do mention participants in my writing it is always through the filter of my experience of others’ words, my experience of others actions, and my subsequent understanding of events (Turner 2013: 220). To emphasise the subjective nature of the following autoethnographic account I have deliberately refrained from using quotation marks for dialogue (even when the original records are available to me verbatim, such as in film form). I intend this as a grammatical marker that the conversations I have selected for inclusion are ultimately based on my own reading and reconstruction of events. Additionally, it should also be noted that some of my participants are ‘elites’ (in ethnographic terms), and as such have already published their own accounts and reflections upon the filmmaking from their own

2 Off the Record website available at: https://archaeologydocumentary.wordpress.com/

254 Chapter 6 perspectives as well. I was not involved in these publications in any way and am fully supportive of their right to tell events from their perspectives.

In keeping with the University of Southampton policy on data collection and the Data Protection Act (1998), and subsequent General Data Protection Regulation (2018), the original ethnographic/production diary records and their analyses, and related materials, are backed up securely on password-protected, offline external hard-drives, and used for the purpose of this study only – this data will never be shared with anyone and remains in an anonymised format.

6.3 Autoethnography: Hitting Record

6.3.1 Prelude

February 2019

It’s been a few years since I completed this particular archaeology documentary project. I sit in my house – a different one to where I originally edited the film – but I’m at the same small desk, in a little white office, overlooking the street. It’s 5:30am. Still dark. I haven’t slept. I’m cold and tired, but my mind is restless. Writing this account, thinking about how to write it, has been a source of concern to me for a long time.

There are gaps in this story. Words left on the cutting room floor. These, you will see, were necessary. This is the story of how I made – or attempted to make – a vérité documentary3 about an archaeological excavation.

6.3.2 Tread gently

May 201*

It’s going to be a very boring film if all you do is film people trowelling dirt, growls Tom4, as he cleans back the surface of what will become trench three.

I sigh internally. It’s the first day of the field-school, my first day filming, and the second time in as many hours that an archaeologist has snapped at me for

3 ‘Vérité’ as in the contemporary British tradition of cinéma vérité, see Chapter Five section 5.4. 4 Participant names are changes for anonymisation purposes.

255 Chapter 6 filming them – which is a little ironic seeing as I was asked to come and film this dig.

***

I am here to film at the archaeologists’ invitation, and both I and they cast my role as an informal commission, although there’s no formal contract or payment involved. That I am unpaid is not uncommon for documentary, where filmmakers often (and increasingly) earn little or no income from their films.5 Commissions in various guises are not uncommon either: Flaherty, Grierson, the Maysles brothers, Susan Froemke, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Ken Loach, and Molly Dineen are all documentary veterans who accepted corporate sponsorship or undertook commissions, to varying degrees of ease, pleasure, conflict, or regret (Barnouw 1993; Stubbs 2002; Sheffield Doc/Fest 2012). Yet such works occupy a controversial space in the documentary canon in terms of artistic and journalistic credibility, and are often excluded from grants and awards on the grounds of perceived bias and overt commercial influence. My informal agreement with the archaeologists is that I will give the final film to the archaeologists, and in exchange I will use the films’ production as a case study in my Ph.D. research. The archaeologists are sincerely keen and supportive for me to use the film as a case study, and I’m enthusiastic to support their fieldwork too. As an act of good faith and transparency I’ve offered to give the archaeologists the raw footage of the film as well, which they accept as a matter of course, a response which I find odd as documentary filmmakers are never so generous, even when commissioned. Among my provisos, which I drafted in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and which the archaeologists have agreed to, are that I expect to be credited fairly for my work, and the film and its footage can only ever be used for non-profit purposes.

We have not specified who gets editorial rights over the film, but have instead pursued a philosophy of equal collaboration. During pre-production we had many discussions about what the story was going to be about, and how that might be

5 For context, in the CMSI survey of professional US documentary filmmakers, 13% of filmmakers received only ‘some’ (26-50%) of their annual income from documentary filmmaking, 27% received ‘not much’ (1-25%), and 12% received none. Regarding expected revenue, 42% of US documentaries made zero revenue from sales; and finally 26% of documentarists received less than 50% of their expected salary from their most recent film, and 36% received no salary from it at all (Borum Chattoo and Harder 2018: 18, 32-4; see also Whicker’s et al. 2017). Evidently, documentary filmmakers aren’t in it for the money.

256 Chapter 6 achieved. Kim, the project manager of the organisation running the field-school and my main point of contact, has stressed that the organisation desires a film about the excavation that’s a proper observational documentary, not the fakery of television. The organisation had previously hired a videographer to make promotional videos for them, which went well, but now they want something different, not just a behind the scenes perspective, but an approach I recognise as vérité cinema (see 5.4 for a discussion on vérité). They ask me to stay with them in the archaeologists’ accommodation to get better coverage. I’ve been given a bunk and some of my travel expenses and occasional communal meals covered, while I fund the rest of the travel costs, meals, filming and editing equipment, production costs, and my labour.

Kim tells me my involvement in the archaeology project will “fulfil the artistic soul” of the archaeology project, and has repeatedly stressed that I’m free to make the film as I see fit. As this is a field school, I had planned to build the story around the central question “What makes someone an archaeologist?”. It’s a typical central question for any vocation-based documentary, but Kim is not convinced by this angle, and in our various conversations, emails, and exchanges over the past months she and the other archaeologists have emphasised that the archaeological process should be core to the story. So I’ve already spent some time moving back and forth between the archaeologists’ wishes, and the need to maintain a storytelling premise that can work in film form. For my part, I’ve wanted to make a vérité documentary about archaeology for years, so I positively jumped at the invitation to film. I also want to work closely on the filmmaking with the archaeologists and any community stakeholders who might become key participants, to give each of them a say in how this story takes shape, and because I’m curious to see what they make of the filmmaking process. That said, when I sent my draft treatment around to crewmembers some weeks before the dig, to give them a feel for the intended film, I had few responses. It’s hard to collaborate when the other side is half keen, half… something else.

***

It’s going to be a very boring film if all you do is film people trowelling dirt.

Tom’s hostility has nothing to do with me personally, of course. Field archaeology has always had an insider/outsider division where those who don’t push wheelbarrows are unlikely to be accepted, as observed by Edgeworth (2003: 21). I’ve been asked by the senior archaeologists to leave most of the digging to the

257 Chapter 6 trainees (who have paid for the privilege), and in any case, the dispersed nature of the site means I spend too much time running between trenches (10 minutes either way) to spare time off from filming. But if I don’t change Tom’s tone towards me quickly, he’ll come across as rude towards potential future audiences.

Also, I just prefer to get along with people.

I stop recording, and drop the camera from my eye, resting it on my knee, squatting at his level.

I make small talk.

I emphasize my archaeological credentials and allegiance: I’m an archaeology student too, I say. I’ve spent years working on commercial archaeology sites as well. Although I’m holding a camera now, I’ve done my share in the trenches. I avow myself an archaeologist first, and a filmmaker second.

The tension begins to melt from his body, and his expression softens in pleasant surprise.

***

A few days later, after we’ve had time to build a genuine rapport, Tom invites me back to film a part of the trench where he’s uncovered a scatter of human remains in the tumble of the plough-zone, before photographing and bagging them. Now he blossoms on screen, pointing out each fragment to the camera, taking his time to explain his interpretation of the findings to me and their significance, as we examine them together.

***

With a few exceptions, I’ve noticed that archaeologists are particularly ambivalent towards film cameras and filmmakers, moreso than people from other walks of life. I’ve filmed with artists, dancers, activists, politicians, former-refugees, and Indigenous elders – but archaeologists I still find among the most challenging. It can’t just be a matter of elitism as not all archaeologists have the privileges of elites, especially fieldworkers (although it certainly is the case for some). But even when people on site are friendly to me otherwise, as soon as I have my lens pointed towards them, they become shy, edgy, and guarded. Some physically flinch when I turn the camera towards them, and others refuse to make eye contact, even when talking to me. To counter archaeologists’ wariness, I follow

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Molly Dineen’s strategy and try to first meet participants “on camera”6 so they might get used to the machine’s presence to the point where they come to think of the camera as an extension to my own body. The goal is that over time participants will stop reacting to the camera, or even noticing it, and respond to me as a person instead – which is no mean feat to ask of them given that my camcorder obscures half my face when filming.

Occasionally I meet archaeologists who are the opposite of shy, such as Gary. Gary seems to seek the camera out, and he performs to it as though a presenter on a TV show (looking down the barrel, speaking straight to the audience). I’m thrilled to have such an enthusiastic participant, and he certainly helps me get routine coverage such as daily updates for the trench excavation aims and finds, and even if I don’t use the footage it will make a useful aide memoir for the edit. However, Gary’s performance is not the style of vérité I’m pursuing, and my attempts to gently encourage him to be himself and speak to me as a person seem to fall on deaf ears. He assures me that he’s a student of Time Team, and has been in many social media videos previously, so he knows what he’s doing. His behaviour also has a domino effect, making some other members of the crew self-conscious in front of the camera. Soon, he starts to verbally or physically intrude into my other shots as well, interrupting me when I’m shooting establishing shots, pans, and cut aways, and even once attempting to take over one of my interviews with another archaeologist, walking up half-way through and asking his own (leading) questions, changing the direction of the conversation to mimic factual TV. At the moment I’m rolling with the situation, balancing the need to keep Gary sweet, with the need to make space for others to speak, and for me to capture the material I need. But it’s a delicate balance. Gary’s behaviour also calls to mind observational cartoon by field archaeologist and archaeological illustrator Vicki Herring, in which she visually critiques a similar pattern of behaviour on commercial archaeology sites (see Figure 6.1; from Everill’s Invisible Labourers 2012):

6 As described by vérité filmmaker Molly Dineen (Sheffield Doc/Fest 2012).

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Figure 6.1: Cheesy Director by Vicki Herring [Source: Everill 2012: figure 25 (Reproduced with permission of Vicki Herring © 2012)].

Fortunately, other archaeologists have responded exactly how I’d hoped, particularly those mid-way or lower down the archaeology hierarchy. For example, Martin, who supervises trench four (on the other side of the village), is very relaxed and natural on camera. He inspires a friendly camaraderie at his trench which makes it a really nice and friendly space to film in. He’s even invited me to join in the dig there which would be lovely if and when I find the time (this is the first excavation I’ve filmed where I haven’t dug as well, and I suspect that fact is also affecting my rapport with the team). Peter, another of the trench supervisors, is equally accommodating and cheerfully shares his ideas about both the archaeology and filming. I’m delighted to say that Simon, one of the trainees, always smiles when he sees me and has given me the nickname Kate-the-camera (a reference to Under Milkwood), suggesting that at least for some participants my attempts to make the camera appear an extension of myself have worked. With these archaeologists, we speak to one another as colleagues, off and on camera as well, which is easier for them (no pressure to perform), and easier for

260 Chapter 6 me, allowing me to concentrate on following the real course of events, activities, and conversations. It’s how I prefer to work: slowly, gently, and attentively. And every day, as new diggers came to join the project, I’ve graduated from being the outsider-new-girl to being seen as more of an old-hand, which has also helped some newer members of the dig be more accepting of me.

6.3.3 Tech-check

I partly blame the camera for my delicate relationship with participants. It’s big, black, gun-like, and obscures my face when I shoot using the eyepiece. I prefer to shoot using the eye piece rather than the pop-out LCD display partly to get more flattering angles of participants, but also so that when they speak to me our eyelines meet, and they direct their responses toward future viewers, rather than looking somewhere out of frame. But I must look like some kind of spindly monstrous one-eyed, badly postured, half-machine half-woman to those in front of the lens.

For this shoot I’m using a Canon XF300, a professional camcorder and the only broadcast-quality camera within my price range to purchase (the excavation runs too long to justify the expense of renting). Now with 4K cameras on the market Canon XF300’s have ceased production, but after a decade as documentary equipment staples they’re still industry standard. Sound being as important as image, I also have an attached directional rode mic with a dead cat (to protect the mic from the wind), the sound cables hanging off the side, taped out of the way. I don’t have a sound crew, so to get good sound I have to point the mic and therefore the camera at whoever is speaking, which is annoying, as sometimes the listeners and their responses are more significant. I also have Sennheiser radio mics that can be clipped onto participants’ lapels, but there’s usually little time and opportunity to set them up. With the whipping wind and frequent rain that dictate every hour of this dig, getting good sound is one of the greatest technical challenges on this shoot.

A few members of the archaeology team have asked me why I don’t use a DSLR photography camera, like the videographer they hired to make promotional videos in previous seasons. It’s becoming a bit annoying, being repeatedly compared to him and his very different filming aims, although I understand he’s one of their main points of reference for filmmaking. I explain that although DSLR’s are cheaper, create beautiful images, and are good for staged or scripted scenes, they’re a challenge to use for observational filmmaking. Ergonomically

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DSLRs are designed for still photography, not filming. Unless you hack them, DSLRs usually have a time-limit of 29 minutes 59 seconds for single shots, approx. 15 minutes on older models, which interrupts longer takes like interviews (it’s a tax issue – to film longer would reclassify DSLRs from photograph to video equipment, subjecting them to higher tax rates). They often over-heat with long shots, and need to be turned off to cool down. To adjust visual or sound settings on a DSLR you need to navigate through a digital menu via the LCD display, which is awkward and time consuming, especially for solo-shooting. Again, this is not a problem for scripted or pre-planned filming, but it’s useless for vérité which is unpredictable and requires quick changes of focus, sound, and exposure settings, as you need to be able to move quickly between lighting conditions, foci, etc. In comparison to a DSLR, a camcorder is a run-and-gun camera, and an old-fashioned staple for documentary. The sound, focus, zoom, white balance, gain, and other controls are directly accessible on the outside of the case, available at a touch; focus pulling is more ergonomic; and oh, there are handles. It’s a fixed-lens camcorder, so no pretty soft-focus shots (although these have become cliché within the industry now, or so I’ve been told at film festivals) – but it’s perfect for chasing action. In my mind, using a DSLR for vérité shooting would be like trying to excavate with a bricklaying trowel instead of an archaeologist’s trowel – you must pick the right tool for the job.

Still, the camcorder isn’t perfect. It’s obvious, physically intrusive, and evidently can be intimidating to participants, which can affect both access and participant relationships, especially for solo-shooting. My model has the eye-piece projecting from the back, rather than the side as with older models, which obscures my face and makes it hard for participants to relate to me. The weight is heavy and tiring, I need to give my back and arms breaks every 20 minutes or so to get the blood moving again, and I have to wear a wrist guard to ease the strain (the same one I wear when trowelling on excavations, in fact).

At least, all of this is what I try to explain to the archaeologists when I’m asked. Some are intrigued, and we talk more. Others walk off before I’ve finished answering, perhaps convinced DSLRs are still better, and I just don’t know what I’m doing.

6.3.4 The inscribed pot

Kate! Russell grins widely, beckoning from across the village square, Are you going to the hall to film the pot?!

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I’ve just come back from filming a circuit of the trenches and am looking forward to a loo break.

What pot?

Oh you don’t know? We just found a fully intact pot – and it’s inscribed – so rare – I think they’re only two others of this type known – it might help us date the site – it’s exactly what we’re looking for!

Russell beams ear to ear, his delight infectious, and I can’t help but smile back.

Inwardly I swear.

I’m surprised you didn’t know – we announced it on the walkie talkies an hour ago!

An hour ago. Awesome.

I don’t have a walkie talkie, I explain, I’ve just been filming at trench four – no one’s mentioned it.

Sympathetically Russell suggests we film “a spot” with me during the afternoon tea break, in the finds room at the village hall, so we can “get it on camera.” I agree and thank him, and he dashes off again, while I figured out where I should be.

I’m annoyed. I check the staff WhatsApp and there is no mention of the new find. I darkly wonder if I’m the last person to find out about the pot – and even then, only by chance. How on earth am I supposed to film this dig if I’m kept outside the flow of information?

***

At the agreed time I head to the village hall to wait for Russell. It’s warm and comfortable, but the small room we’re using is starting to become cluttered with rows of plastic crates of drying artefacts, with tubs of dirty water on all the tables, along with a growing colony of used mugs and scattered paperwork. Navigating through the space to the improvised cloakroom at the back, without knocking anything over with my backpack and the bulky camera is a challenge, and I can tell it annoys the archaeologists. Deanne, one of the trainees, is sitting by a window cleaning finds, whilst Mel is at one of the desks on the other side of the room working on her laptop. I’ve thus far failed to charm Mel, who is generally curt toward me. Mel’s attitude reminds me that I am yet to be accepted by what

263 Chapter 6 seems to be an inner circle of the archaeology crew, so instead I opt to make small talk with Deanne while I wait for Russell. We’re soon joined by two of the trainees, Simon and Charlotte.

Hello Kate-the-camera! smiles Simon warmly. We exchange pleasantries, then, We’ve come to see the pot before we leave this afternoon!

Oh, me too-

It’s not here, interrupts Mel suddenly, It’s in the house. Sean’s photographing it.

What?! Simon and I were equally dismayed.

Ugh! That’s why I’ve been waiting here, to film it with Russell. I sigh. There’s a major communication breakdown going on…

Yeah- Deanne begins.

Well it needs to be photographed, snaps Mel, That’s the priority: the archaeology, not some little video spot.

For a brief moment an awkward pall descends on the room.

When were you meeting Russell here? Simon asked me, a little too cheerfully.

Tea break, I reply quietly.

So right now? He chuckles.

Yeah. Russell asked me to be here to get some coverage of the pot with him. I uh, guess I’ll go see Sean and find out what’s going on.

I told Simon I’d try to let him know where the pot was once I figured it out, and headed out again. As I walk out I tried to ignore a stream of dismissive commentary behind me from Mel about my “video”.

I wonder if I had enough coverage of the activities at the village hall by now to justify filming less there from now on…

I stick my head into the holiday house and find Sean – another friendly face thank goodness – and he confirms he hasn’t got around to photographing the pot yet, he has other work to finish first. So much for priorities. I go back outside to take my muddy boots off and see Russell rushing past across the other end of the square. He waves at me and pointed in the direction of the village hall.

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It’s here! I call back, Sean has it!

Apparently, Russell is out of the loop too.

He races over, half eaten sandwich in hand. I have to smile, telling him to take his time, eat his lunch, and then we’ll do the filming.

To fit the filming into the excavation workflow we have to film in the holiday house, a frustration which I tried to hide, instead keeping a positive front. The house is far away from the archaeological setting, often empty of people, and the lounge room – the least noisy space – has appalling lighting. Our “spot” had effectively become a somewhat staged formal interview. This was the exact opposite style of filmmaking to what I and the archaeologists had envisioned for this film, but I have no choice – I have to take my opportunities to film with the archaeologists when and how they come.

***

Later that afternoon I return to film more at the trenches, but am so exhausted by the time they closed them down for the day that I drag myself back to the house and collapse into bed by 17:00. I stay in bed most of the evening, skipping the communal meal Martin has cooked for everyone.

That evening, when she came into our bunk-room to go to bed, Tess (another junior archaeologist and general dogsbody) asks me how my day was. I say it had been good and bad, mentioning my frustrations about the pot, and about feeling excluded from the flow of information that is essential to my job. Tess is sympathetic and nods sagely: That happens a lot around here. You’ll get used to it. It’s nothing personal.

I’m deeply relieved to hear this (It’s not just me), and I hope it means that I am not as much on the outside as I thought. However, I also can’t shake my unease about how hierarchical, and gendered, the project is, and how this is affecting my filming access. All the senior fieldwork roles (field directors, trench supervisors, etc) are held by men between about 30-60 years old, and who are obliging and whom I get along with perfectly fine. Whereas us women seem to have quite different roles: other than Kim (the project manager) who is older, all the women on staff seem to be in their early-mid 20s, in junior roles that seem interchangeable: they take turns doing various administrative and marketing duties, finds processing, public liaising, facilitating school workshops, cleaning the accommodation, and making tea for everyone (water collecting seems to be a

265 Chapter 6 constant task). I suspect I probably spend more time out in the field than most of the other woman on site, even though I’m not digging. In a way it’s like I’ve jumped the hierarchy. And other than Tess (who I share a bunk with), I’m very much on the outside of this women’s group. It feels deeply uncomfortable.

On the plus side the weather has vastly improved with less mud and more sun, lifting everyone’s moods, and promising recovery from the head colds half the crew have caught.

6.3.5 A visit from Delve-TV

A week and a half into the excavation I meet Nicole, a camera-woman from Delve TV. I’m intrigued to meet a camera woman – gender certainly plays a role in documentary cinematography and informs the type of relationships captured on screen, as Poitrowska observed in her practice (2014: 196). Only 7% of UK cinematographers are women (Cobb et al. 2018) – a demographic I’ve always partly assumed was largely due to the weight of camera (my camcorder seems to get heavier by the day). It’s physically arduous, holding a camera laden with cables and mics up to your eye level for long periods, especially for long, continuous and stable shots. Beefy, strong, news-cameramen (and they are usually men) rest their hefty cameras on their shoulders, and I remember being told in film school by a veteran woman filmmaker to simply get a male cameraman and just direct them – that’s how she dealt with the issue of camera weight. Other women shoot from the hip, use tripods (therefore largely abandoning vérité), rigs, or more often use smaller, lighter, low quality cameras. Nicole has what looks like a small, consumer level camcorder (Poitrowska, Molly Dineen and Joan Churchill too opted for lightweight camcorders, 2014: 196; Dineen 2012; Churchill 2012).Nicole is being given a tour of the site by two of the senior archaeologists, which I assumed was part of a recce for them to decide together what, where, and when to film.

Nicole’s arrival had been heralded by much negativity among the archaeologists. Whenever mention was made that a Delve-TV crew was coming some of the archaeologists descended into a litany of complaints about their various previous negative encounters with awful television crews. Twice previously the archaeology organisation had accommodated television crews only to be left on the cutting room floor – evidently their patience by now had worn out. One member of the archaeology team also told me how they felt it was unreasonable that television crews expected to be met when they arrived on site, to be treated as special

266 Chapter 6 visitors and given tours, and worst of all how they told everyone what to do during a shoot. This seemed a little hypocritical to me – the dig had many archaeologist visitors who played no role in the actual project, but were given such VIP treatment, and of course the television crew needed that kind of informed contact to know what to film, and how. But I keep these thoughts to myself.

In any case, I’m relieved to see that despite the hostility harboured, the archaeologists are still being polite and professional towards Nicole, at least until a conversation about the weather conditions for filming led one of the senior archaeologists to curtly insist that whatever the weather the television crew would still have to fit in with the archaeologists’ workflow, to which Nicole hastily assures them they would do their best not to interrupt the archaeological work in any way. This descends into strained negotiations about filming licenses and company policies. At Nicole’s request for confidentiality regarding these, I leave them to it and return to my circuit of filming the trenches and finds processing.

***

Later, back at the holiday house, I perch on the bottom of the stairs at the entrance way taking my boots off, as Nicole passes by, pauses, and stops for a chat. She agrees observational is the best mode for filming archaeology, then asks,

Do you have any footage of anything being discovered?

My mind briefly flits to the inscribed pot.

No, I shrug, nothing spectacular – but I have some wonderful oral histories with some of the villagers who live next to the trenches-

Nicole loses interest in the conversation pretty quickly after that, apologising that she has to go and send an email before wandering outside to find phone signal.

***

Later that day I run into Nicole again during my afternoon circuit of the trenches, and this time we get to have a longer conversation. I ask about her work in television. She has worked as a freelancing producer-director for Delve-TV for three years now, and will shortly be leaving the company to move on to something new.

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We’re all freelancers, she smiles at me wryly, It’s impossible to get a secure job in TV – know this now!

Our conversation quickly turns to what she sees as “the problem” between archaeologists and filmmakers. To Nicole, the misunderstanding stems from visual storytelling:

Archaeologists want their stories to be on television, but visually they don’t work. She points to the trench section and the scatter of ancient building rubble that is gradually being uncovered, Archaeologists see that and they see a story, but the audience, the viewer – without a three-year degree – can’t. So it just doesn’t work. And that’s why archaeologists get frustrated.

Nicole’s perspective aligns with Goodwin’s thesis of “professional vision”: the notion that differing professions have different socially organised and taught ways of legitimately seeing and understanding the same phenomenon, as befits the interests of that profession (1994: 606; see also Morgan 2012). Nicole clearly appreciates archaeologists’ ability to “see” dirt for what it can tell us (Goodwin 1994: 608), but her job as filmmaker was to see what that same dirt can tell the camera as a recording machine, and beyond it, audiences, producers, commissioners, and so forth. She has to translate broadly.

Nicole strongly believes that radio would suit archaeology better that television – impressing this on me twice. She has to get back to her filming, so I step away to give her space, so that I wouldn’t intrude on her frame.

Later I observe her as she films and noticed that despite three years of filming archaeology, she still did do some of those things that might annoy archaeologists: walking inside the trench without apparent regard for what was underfoot (the surface had only just been cleaned that morning), sitting on the fragile lip of the trench, and at one point leaning and stretching across it for a shot.

Although, to be honest, many of the archaeologists here did these things too.

Albert, one of the archaeologists, was obliging Nicole as she directed him to tell the story of the site, following him as he worked his way up and down the trench, gesturing here and there, archaeologists quietly trowelling or recording either side of them as they walked. Albert follows her instructions, including topics to talk about, clarifying terms for the audience, distilling long explanations into shorter ones, doing retakes and close-up cut-aways of his gestures and the

268 Chapter 6 archaeological features as needed. At one point she asks him to repeat almost word for word what she tells him to say – in summary of his own earlier (but wordier) explanation. It is fascinating watching Albert follow her direction, switching back and forth – without hesitation – between his usual low key, slightly reserved, dry humoured personality, to becoming a louder, more energetic and enthusiastic for-TV speaker. Although he is clearly out of character, Albert and Nicole seemed to be on amicable terms, joking and chatting to each other.

***

Or so I thought.

Later, Albert disclosed his uneasiness and frustrations about the Delve-TV filming to me, complaining that the TV crew was just after the best shots, and had little regard for the archaeologist being filmed. By then Albert had also developed a bad cold and his patience was wearing thin. His feelings resonated with concerns raised by my survey respondents: the frustrations of being directed to perform according to a pre-defined script, and the concern of possibly being misrepresented, and all that might come with that (See 3.3.2 (R3771) and (R9906)). Evidently then, what had looked to me to be a breakthrough in archaeologist-filmmaker relations was simply a polite veil over what was really continuing, simmering distrust. At least from the archaeological side. By now Nicole had left, taking with her any thoughts she might have had on the matter.

6.3.6 Sick and tired

I’m worried. I’ve noticed myself growing weaker and it’s starting to affect my ability to film. It’s 8:30am and I’ve joined Mike on the bluff to capture some of his drone filming, about a 10-minute walk from the holiday house. I brought my tripod with me because I’m not sure I can hold the camera stable for long enough for the shots – but even standing beside the tripod is difficult, and I keep having to sit down to catch my breath. I like spending time with Mike – a visiting archaeologist who was been instantly friendly and chatty with me when we met some days before – but now I’m worried that I might seem unprofessional in front of him. Luckily his eyes are glued to the sky, making sure no birds come near the drone as he manoeuvres it over the trenches.

Russell wanders up partway through Mike’s filming and stands by him, chatting about the good turn in the weather (it really is a lovely day: 18’, little wind, sunny

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– perfect for both Mike and my filming). Then Russell looks over to me – and falters.

Kate. You look dreadful. Your face is ashen. You should go back to the house. Can you walk?

I’m ok, I can walk back, it’s not far.

I still haven’t got the footage of Mike I’d planned. I want to interview him about his process, and I’m mindful that he’ll be leaving the project soon.

Russell and Mike confer, whilst I sit back down on the ground again and contemplate the logistics of taking my camera off the tripod to get some vertical shots. Eventually it is agreed that after Mike is done he’ll will drive me back to the holiday house – I gratefully accept.

***

Later that morning, with Kim’s assent (since it would take us both away from our work on site), Tess drives me to the next village for a GP appointment to get checked out (we will also pick up groceries for everyone while we we’re there). As an out of area patient I’m unable to get an appointment with a doctor, but a nurse-practitioner sees me. Fortunately, my head-cold by now has lessened, but my period had been going for 9 days straight, heavy and painful, which is a worry. I’ve made a list of my symptoms on my smart phone to save time in the 10-minute appointment, and I recite these to the nurse: weakness; tiredness; dizziness; some vomiting; heavy, painful period; constipation; dry mouth; excessive thirst and hunger (I am so, so thirsty). I’m worried, shamefully almost tearful, but the nurse seems unfazed. She suggests that the symptoms indicate that the pill had failed and my natural menstrual cycle had broken through the artificial one, causing my body to overreact. She gives me a prescription for painkillers, before gently suggesting that my symptoms could also be partly psycho-somatic, and to try not to worry so much.

After we get back I eat my lunch in my and Tess’s bedroom, seeking some quiet. It is better to take some of my meals away from the archaeologists, to keep our updates and conversations fresh for the camera, rather than having to ask people to repeat themselves for it, to avoid prompting performances. I go back out to film at 14:15, getting back at 16:00, after which I collapse into bed and rest for an hour. Then, after filming the evening meeting, I go back to my room and my bed for the rest of the evening, to catch up on this diary.

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Tessa, Mike, Martin, and Peter all checked in with me during the evening to see how I am, kindly offering to help carry things for me tomorrow if I need it. I am so grateful for their friendly faces.

6.3.7 Not best practice

Two weeks in and my filming routine is set. I film the archaeologists doing aerial photography, 3D modelling, administrative tasks, excavating on site, cleaning and processing finds – wherever their work takes them. Conversations follow the vérité style: informal, opportunistic, personal. On site I shoot low, from the sides of the trenches, or alternatively (and always asking permission at this point in the excavation) I step carefully into the trenches and shoot in amid the diggers, over their shoulders or beside them. Once close, I take the opportunity to discuss their work with them as they go. If it feels appropriate, I ask for a mini-tour of the site, or of their part of the trench, or even just the feature they’re working on, asking them to talk me through their interpretations as they come to mind. I always try to make our conversations organic and personal, part of the flow of their work so they can keep digging or drawing as we talk, which I find gives people space to pause and think before they answer, and helps mitigate shyness. I feel it’s also an approach that synchronises with the natural flow of conversations during various work tasks, which are so much part of the atmosphere on digs. I end by collecting cut-aways and close ups of anything that had come up during our conversations: features, finds, visual details of activities, scene and setting, and of course, the participants back at work without my interference. I shoot-to-cut, which strictly speaking isn’t vérité, but it’s useful for the edit. I’ve begun to follow a few key individuals, at all levels of the archaeological hierarchy, through their personal experience of the site and how they make sense of it.

By now most of the crew are used to me and are accommodating of my filming. Russell in particular is very friendly towards me now, and speaks to me as a person despite the camera’s presence. There’s still some distance between myself and a couple of the core members of staff however – a distance I’ve not experienced with archaeologists before, but again, this is the first time I haven’t excavated and shared the physical archaeological workload.

Then I encounter another quandary.

One day I film the excavation of human remains by one of the trainees, Dennis, who is delighted to be tasked with excavating a skeleton in his first week of field

271 Chapter 6 archaeology. I’m in the middle of filming a wide-shot of the full trench, and all the crew working within it, when Albert quietly approaches me and asks:

Kate, can you not film that? It’s not best practice.

I promptly stop, lowering the camera to my side, and pause to see what Albert is talking about. He’s right: Dennis is lying fully bodied over the part of the trench where fragments of delicate bone have been emerging, rather than squatting and minimizing his contact with the ground. And although he is slow and gentle with his trowelling, he is tunnelling around the skull in order to remove it, rather than identifying or following any soil contexts. I’ve been so focused on getting the technical aspects of filming correct – framing, sound, exposure, and focus – that I’ve failed to actually see what I’ve been capturing on film.

I have to ask…

Um, shouldn’t someone be showing him what best practise is then?

We’ve tried! Several times!

Albert rakes a hand through his hair exasperated. He looks exhausted. He’s still trying to recover from the cold (which by now had knocked him out of the field for a couple of days), and the final days of the excavation are upon us. As a professional archaeologist with a commitment to report in scientific detail the site’s archaeological findings, he needs all hands digging. But this was a field school and not all hands are sufficiently experienced or qualified to do the job properly. I empathise with him and recognise this as a common problem in field schools.

Generally, I prefer to shoot first, and leave the decision to keep or reject footage until the edit. But after Alberts request, I maintain a heightened sensitivity to how I frame the trainees, and for the rest of my shots of this trench this morning I stick to wide shots and avoid close ups of Dennis’s work. But as the skull became more exposed, I feel more and more concerned about it. By now Russell has taken over supervising from Albert who has been called away, and I relay the discussion and my concerns to him. He listens quietly, thanks me, and we both return to our respective work.

Later I hear that it was decided not to remove the skull after all, to instead preserve it in context and leave it in place until a later excavation when

272 Chapter 6 osteologists will join the project. Dennis is given another task and the skull is left as it is. I’m relieved.

***

That night, I tried to make sense of the situation. As the controversial pioneer of documentary filmmaking, Robert Flaherty, first acknowledged “Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth” (in Rotha 1983: 157). As a camerawoman I had unwittingly captured footage that might be interpreted as evidence of bad practice. I was not the first archaeologist to be asked to stop filming, and to be perturbed by it: the PATINA team were asked to delete footage during the Portus excavation in 2011 (see 2.5.3.2; Chrysanthi et al. 2015: 264); and Burton diarised his frustrations when Carter repeatedly asked him not to film aspects of Tutankhamun’s tomb for the sake of secrecy (see 4.3.4). Such footage can put strain not only on personal relationships, but can put archaeological projects and professional reputations at risk. At the same time, I knew this was a missed opportunity. Filming the senior staff problem solving the skull’s mistreatment could have given important insight into how modern field schools struggle to balance the need to fund their digs by charging fees to trainees (or students), against the need to achieve scientific rigour, which is only possible through seasoned and professional excavators (in this case, osteologists). Ultimately, the project had made the right decision by deciding to leave the skulls in situ. But I didn’t have the level of access I needed to film this reality, and as an embedded archaeologist-filmmaker I was too nervous to challenge the hierarchy and push for such a story. Instead, I was relegated (or I relegated myself) to constructing an idealised and untrue portrayal of archaeology as a neat, simple, scientific process. I believe that the moment I obliged Albert and stopped filming, stopped “digging” for a truthful story, was the moment the film stopped being a documentary. I felt sick in my stomach, and it had nothing to do with any illness. As a documentary filmmaker, I too had failed in “best practice”.

6.3.8 A moment of rest

June 201*

Last day.

Walking between all the project locations – the trenches, the village hall, the holiday house – seems to take longer as the dig wears on. I’m guzzling down several litres of water each day, but I can’t seem to slack my thirst. My tongue is

273 Chapter 6 sticky and thick, and I keep having to wipe foamy saliva away from the corners of my mouth. It makes it difficult to carry out conversations and interviews. It’s also getting harder to hold the camera steady for long takes, and I’m having to crouch and rest more frequently. Luckily, I found a conveniently located block of concrete, on the corner of the street midway between the two trenches. Sitting on it for a couple minutes to rest on my way between locations has become part of my daily circuit.

6.3.9 Wrapped

It’s in the can.

I’m on train.

By myself.

Shattered.

The edit lies ahead, but the hard part is done, I tell myself.

6.3.10 Hiatus

July 201*

It’s the infusion pump alarm – that’s the noise that keeps going off. A nurse is adjusting it now, while the on-call doctor pulls up the chair beside me for another test. The nurses are wearing pink and maroon scrubs, and the doctors are in teal. They change regularly so knowing the colours helps me to remember who’s what. I know the routine now too – we do it every hour. I hold out my right hand, middle finger slightly raised, and the nurse lances it – just enough to puncture the skin – a tiny dark red balloon briefly grows, perching delicately, before she taps it to the test strip. It still hurts but not as much this time. The little monitor beeps brightly.

Ok, I think we can pause your potassium replacement for now… She stands up and joins the nurse at the pump, and they decide it’s time for another bag of saline – is that 3 or 4 litres we’ve been through now?

Can I go to the loo? I ask (while they’re here).

The doctor looks at me sceptically, pursing her lips. I glance towards the patient toilet – it’s just across the room, a couple of beds away.

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I’ll ask one of the nurses to bring the commode. Do you need anything? Any water, or snacks?

I’m fine, thank you. Maybe some help sitting up a bit straighter.

The nurse helps me adjust the pillows and I pull myself upright before they both disappear again.

I have no idea what a commode is, but I’m guess about to find out.

The old woman across from me moans, staring at me. Or staring through me. It’s hard to tell – she’s completely doped up and the old couple who sit quietly and glumly on either side of her look exhausted. I found out earlier today she had just had her left leg amputated, which is why her bedding looks so flat and empty. It all makes sense now, I think dully.

The woman diagonally opposite paces, frustrated. She’s a little older than me and from what I can gather has pneumonia – although she keeps arguing with the medical staff that she’s fine and just wants to de discharged so she can get back to her baby.

I have no idea who is on the other side of the curtain next to me, but they’re very quiet, occasionally I hear them breathing softly. They sound old.

It smells of disinfectant and stale air in here.

***

I’m used to sometimes feeling run down after an excavation, at least needing a day to catch up on washing and eating properly, but this was more than that. A couple of days after getting back, I gave in and saw my GP, who suggested I probably had a virus of some kind. He took a series of blood samples and told me I’d get my results in a week.

That night I began to receive phone calls from an unknown number. I didn’t have the energy to tell them that No, I had not been in a car accident, so I just ignored them. I ignored the caller again at 9:00pm. And at 11:00pm. But when they called again at 6:00am, well, by then I was curious.

It was the out of hours GP from my local practice, and he was outside my front door, asking to come in.

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You’ve tested positive for type-1 diabetes, he told me, There’s a bed waiting for you. You need to go to hospital. Now.

I didn’t just have diabetes however. Further blood and urine tests indicated I also had advanced diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). I would later find out that blood sugar and ketones (an acidic by-product of the body’s fat-burning process) had built up in my blood stream, turning it acidic. Symptoms include shortness of breath, dry mouth, excessive urination, hunger, weakness, dehydration, weight loss (I was surprised to discover I now weighed 46kg) and abdominal pain – all symptoms I had experienced when filming at the excavation. We had caught it just in time, the doctors told me. Another day and it would have been a very different story: untreated, ketoacidosis can result in coma and death.

For two days I was treated for the DKA in the diabetes ward in the acute medical unit at Southampton General Hospital. Soon both colour and flesh returned to my face, and I was able to walk by myself again. After the DKA subsided, I was trained in my hospital bed how to test my blood sugar and inject insulin, and packed off home with a show bag full of needles, blood sugar testing kit, a stack of pamphlets, and a busy schedule of hospital appointments to attend.

When I returned home, I found my camcorder sat at the foot of my stairs. I had been too tired to carry it up to my room when I got back from the dig. The memory cards from the final day of filming was still inside it. But it would have to wait.

6.3.11 Logging

October 201*

I’ve spent the better part of two months logging the footage from the shoot. I had intended to film some of the post-excavation analysis which is taking place in universities across the country, but my illness has interrupted these plans, and my funds for travel have run out. The film will have to stick to just the excavation.

This is a literal “bedroom edit”, I cannot afford to rent editing studio space, and the university is too noisy and busy to work in. I am on the second floor, and can see out onto a row of small back gardens, and the side-street beyond. It is quiet except for the occasional dog barking. My bedroom is small – more of an office size – and it’s difficult to move in this space without knocking something over if you’re not familiar with it. I cross my legs and tuck myself under my small desk,

276 Chapter 6 jammed between my bed and the wall. I keep the area around me simple and bare: my desk has only my Apple Pro laptop, external hard-drive, large over-ear headphones, cheap clip-on lamp, pen and notepad. And of course, a mug with fresh coffee. I have configured my dual 6TB hard-drive for writing to both 3TB components at once, the only way to be able to edit the raw full-quality footage in real-time. My software of choice is Avid media composer, a non-linear editing program that is popular among documentarists due to its ability to handle large volumes of raw high-quality footage. Its interface gives me a something of an omniscient view of the footage: I can see my filing system, tool palettes, video clips, edited version of the film, timeline, and audio and visual tracks all at a single glance. This is not just technically convenient, it shapes my approach to storytelling. I find logging to be a very similar procedure to the sieving, bagging, and cataloguing of archaeological finds – each step building a larger narrative. It is slow, analytical, and time-consuming. But – slowly, slowly – fragments of a story begin to emerge.

Firstly, I watch though every single video-clip and categorise how it might be used to serve the greater story. There’s no other way to get a handle on all the footage but to literally sit and experience each video file in real time, watching critically, listening carefully, determining which parts are worth keeping. Firstly, I watch a clip through from beginning to end, mentally noting what it might offer. Then, if there’s potential in it, I watch the same clip again from the beginning, pausing, cutting it into various sub-clips, each labelled according to possible uses for the edit, categorised into respective bins or sub-bins for each potential use: ‘Day 1’, ‘Day 2’, ‘trench 2’, ‘finds room’, ‘cut-aways’, ‘sound’, ‘atmos’, ‘Martin interview’, ‘finds washing’, so on and so forth. I repeat this process for hundreds of shots, which become thousands of clips – over 65 hours, more than 1 TB worth of raw broadcast quality video files. There is no other way to get to know the footage – you cannot speed-read film clips, and there is no pre-defined script in vérité.

Logging is also the first stage of excluding and rejecting clips, and therefore of excluding scenes, people, events, or locations. My process for rejecting clips at this stage is simple: bad sound and wobbly imagery goes first (although sometimes a clip can still be salvaged by deleting its audio, or vice versa). Thankfully there’s less of this than I’d expected, given my health and the weather conditions. Anything that that is obviously unflattering to participants and irrelevant to the story goes as well. For example, I occasionally find video of participants’ cleavage and the top of people’s bottoms that distracts from the

277 Chapter 6 story, and if possible, I cut these (oh how I wish people would just wear belts). I also discovered more and more instances of poor archaeological practice or questionably ethics. Some of these I logged, if they had elements that might serve the story.

I had to be frank about my mistakes as a filmmaker: in one clip I interrupt a participant too soon during an otherwise excellent interview, in another I forgot to set the mic to the right power source, resulting in off-putting, tinny sound, and occasionally my focusing or exposure was poor enough to write off a clip.

I also cut a lot of myself out of the footage, which is both a relief and an exercise in humility. Watching raw un-touched footage or oneself is cringeworthy and frustrating for anyone, but when your perspective and voice dictates every single scene (even though I visually never entered the frame), you have to develop a ruthless honesty about your ‘self’ within every moment of the film to merit its ex/inclusion. Even worse, as I watch the footage from the first day through to the last, I began to see my undiagnosed diabetes taking hold and affecting the filmed material. In the first week my shots are confident and purposeful, but by the last week I was clearly struggling to hold the camera up in a still position for more than 20 seconds at a time, and swear words began to find their way into the audio track. Over time my breathing gradually became laboured and intrusive to the footage, and my frames become wobbly and movements stilted. At some point during the last days I noticed that I had started holding my breath during pans and establishing shots in an effort to achieve a smooth movement, and each of these takes ended with sudden gasping and the frame suddenly dropping to the grass. All cut.

Yet the diabetes is still present in those clips I keep as well, even if only subtle. In this way the footage is not only an indexical record of the archaeology excavation but also of my own bodily and emotional experience of the world: viewers will see the archaeology from my perspective: they follow my gaze, see the world from my height, through my movements, and through my relationships with others. The diabetes is present through it all, like a hidden layer of stratigraphy underlying the more obvious narratives of archaeological process. It is the human presence behind the machinery of filmmaking, and despite its apparent absence, to my eye at least, it proves impossible to erase.

I send periodic emails to Kim, my sole point of contact on the archaeology project these days, updating the organisation of my progress. At first she is sceptical that

278 Chapter 6 the diabetes is real, but eventually she accepts that the edit will be delayed, and she is accommodating of the new situation. The film isn’t in a file form that can be shared with the archaeologists yet, but soon, hopefully.

6.3.12 Assemblage

January 201*

By now I am living and breathing the edit, determined to finish as soon as possible.

After I finished logging I spent several weeks compiling an assemblage, which is also a process akin to creating an assemblage in archaeology, in which an ‘assemblage’ is a “group of artefacts recurring together at a particular time and place, and representing the sum of human activities” (Renfrew and Bahn 2008: 578). In documentary filmmaking, practice, building an assemblage involves assembling select sub-clips – those that may prove key to the emergent story – into a test ‘sequence’, as a linear audio and video track, which will become the thread to which all components of the audio-visual narrative are tied (see still 6.1). The first assemblage is a nearly 6-hour long sequence of roughly-cut sub- clips, chosen for their informational, emotional, and aesthetic content, and organised chronologically, documenting the development of the excavation and project around it through time. The immense size of the file repeatedly causes Avid to freeze and crash, to the point where I have had to exclude the footage of the final day until there is enough memory to handle it.

I whittle the assemblage down gradually. I begin by watching the full sequence through from beginning to end, in real time, taking handwritten notes of potential cuts I can make and potential themes and storylines to follow. Then, starting again at the beginning of the timeline, I cut, trim, and re-order each sub clip, working my way from beginning to end. Some decisions are commonsensical (bad sound, repetitions, contradiction, gaps, indulgences – all go), others are based on gut instinct (what feels right, what gels with the surrounding clips). And then I repeat the process: watch, notes, edit; watch, notes, edit.

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Still 6.1: Assemblage 1 of the edit in Avid media composer, with catalogued footage on left (compressed timeline view) [Source: Rogers 2019].

Working from home has its perks as well, namely that my body has begun to recover from the initial shock of the illness. Over the past months my weight has begun to return – I’m now 56kg and climbing, and my hair has stopped falling out. Slowly I’m getting used to the daily cycle of blood tests and injections every few hours, and even the low blood sugar attacks, although these can be exhausting. On the downside, the combined impact of the diabetes and the slower than expected process of editing means I keep having to extend the expected deadline for the film, and Kim is getting impatient.

6.3.13 Rough-cut

February 201*

Every time I make a significant set of changes, I duplicate the total film sequence and make a new “rough-cut” (see Still 6.2 for a rough cut example). I am now up to rough cut #3, currently sitting at 1 hour and 30 minutes long, and I continue to chip away at the length, and experimenting with the sequence of the still emerging story.

The film feels so much better now – there is space to think and breath between the words and visual information. Key participants are becoming more defined as layered personalities with specific roles, motives, and personal goals. It’s starting to feel more like storytelling than a lecture with pictures – in fact some parts have made me laugh or clap in delight, and I’m making a mental note of visual

280 Chapter 6 grammar to splice in: visuals and sounds as chapter markers, breathing spaces, and recurring themes. By now I have sat through certain scenes and events so many times I can recite participants conversations word for word. I’ve also begun to cut any unnecessary verbal ticks: tidying participants’ stutters, rambles, mistaken words, failed jokes, and culling anything that might be unflattering, confusing, or ambiguous to the viewer. It can take a lot of fine, discreet, editing to make participants spoken words sound coherent when they haven’t been scripted and rehearsed – but it’s often the only way to present people and their words “like themselves”. In interviews I sometimes hide these cuts behind cut aways (b-roll) of other imagery (such as the features, objects, or activities being discussed), to avoid visually off-putting jump-cuts.

Still 6.2: Rough Cut 13, in Avid Media Composer, as a demonstration of how the assembled sequence grows in complexity [Source: Rogers 2019].

I’ve also starting to observe the archaeological process emerge as a filmic narrative, and to see how people’s characters and attitudes change over the both the course of the dig, towards me, and towards the archaeology. It’s getting easier to cut less-relevant or ill-fitting clips and even entire sequences out now. I’m starting to spot gaps in narrative logic and have even begun reintroducing previously cut clips if and as needed.

Watch, notes, edit; watch, notes, and edit. It can be tedious, and sometimes I have to force myself to spend a day away from the screen so that I can return with fresh eyes. But I quite like this film, it could be something good. I’m starting to feel proud of it.

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6.3.14 Editing consultations

March 201*

The editing consultations begin with Rough-Cut Five. In my approach to filmmaking I’ve made the unusual choice to allow the archaeologists a significant say in making editorial decisions, bringing them in to the editing process in this early stage. I’ve done this in an attempt to more fairly balance the power relationship between myself and those involved in the archaeology project, who I see as having less agency than myself in the filmmaking process. Granting editorial rights to participants and/or commissioning officers is unusual even in commissioned works (although mine is not a formal commission), unless the participants are thought to be from a vulnerable demographic (e.g. Indigenous or ethnic minority groups, elderly or under-aged participants, etc). This is because many documentary filmmakers find elite participants such as celebrities to be “hostile”, “aggressive and powerful in controlling their images”, and less in need of editorial rights given their easier access to various forms of media representation. Documentary filmmakers extend this estimation of elite agency to politicians, business CEOs, and “experts” (Aufderheide et al. 2009: 10-12, 20). Despite this risk, my decision to bring the archaeologists in to the edit early, is also informed by the findings of the Off The Record survey, in which the vast majority (88%) of respondents had either never (70%) or rarely (18%) been invited to review a documentary production before its release; and the majority (83%) had never (72%) or rarely (11%) been granted some form of editorial rights over documentary productions. I want the archaeologists’ input to ensure we are still on the same page for the overall story and tone, to ensure the historical and scientific narratives are accurate, to give everyone who plays a key role a chance to have a say about the film’s direction, and finally also simply because I want to see what might happen when archaeologists are given this opportunity. That said, with the fieldwork having long wrapped and the team dispersed internationally, my only point of contact with the archaeology project now is Kim. Thankfully, she has assured me she knows enough about filmmaking not to micro-manage, and if I feel the consultations are becoming onerous that I can end the edit as I see fit. In our editing consultations Kim will speak on behalf of the rest of the archaeologists, so I have to trust that she is reporting my work and words fairly to them, and their feedback fairly to me.

***

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Some of Kim’s feedback for the edit is certainly in line with my own thoughts and intentions, or even makes me see the footage afresh and with a more critical eye – both useful contributions to the editing process.

Perhaps unsurprisingly however, Kim and my consultations become increasingly characterised by disagreements, although not necessarily because of any inherent filmmaker-archaeologist differences. In documentaries, the editing process is where the story is effectively “made”, and is consequently often a site where conflicting interests, values, perspectives, and expectations emerge. This occurs even between like-minded professional filmmakers. For instance, married couple and documentary luminaries D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus have even joked about routinely getting “divorced three times in the editing process” during their early collaborations (Stubbs 2002: 64). That said, there are certainly archaeology- specific factors at play here. From my perspective as filmmaker, Kim and my editorial disagreements stem from three core problems: firstly, a literal difference in professional vision of the editing process (after Goodwin 1994; Morgan 2012); secondly that I am still an ‘outsider’ to the archaeology organisation and therefore kept at a distance from the archaeological information needed to inform the film; and lastly that the influence of factual TV and corporate videography is so ingrained in archaeologists’ expectations of documentary filmmaking, that I’m not sure if I can push beyond these expectations to be able to achieve the documentary mission. Each of these problems are also confounded by the fact that I am operating from the bottom of a strict and gendered field-based archaeological hierarchy as well.

The first key problem of “professional vision” is simply a logistical and visual one. Usually when participants are invited to consult on film edits, they must come to the editing studio to fit within the editing schedule, given the expenses and workload involved on the part of the production.7 This also means the editor and/or director is present to set boundaries for and guide the terms of the consultation, such as making sure participant A doesn’t try to control the representation or words of participant B. However, due to the archaeologists’ ongoing and geographical dispersed fieldwork projects, this is not an option for us. Instead I have to take several hours out of the edit to render, export, and upload via file-share a low-res version of the cut to share with the archaeologists

7 As well as the costs of studio rental, minimum union-recommended payrates for film editors in the UK are £1138.50 per week (BECTU 2018).

283 Chapter 6 to get their feedback, as and when they find the time. Consequently, receiving feedback can take up to five days, by which time the edit had advanced forward, which makes the whole process awkward and at times redundant. Neither am I there to explain the editing process in person, or what to expect from it, which causes further problems.

After the first couple of emails of feedback from Kim on the rough-cuts, I realise that I have also failed to consider Kim’s different visual and audio experiences of the film. As editor I’m viewing the film somewhat omnisciently, as a non-linear collection of potential and fragmentary components, with editorial markers visible to me on the timeline, and better sound quality via my over-ear headphones. In short I see it as myriad possibilities and potential stories to follow. If we had consulted in person this would also have been Kim’s view and experience as well. But instead, by remotely viewing the rough-cuts outside of the context of the editing software, Kim is experiencing the film as a single framed linear-narrative with jarring intrusive sound (the sound-mix being the last stage of editing) (see still 6.3). Therefore, instead of seeing the rough-cuts as a series of steps towards an emergent story – or a better analogy might be as components of a recipe – Kim only sees a badly-made film she (by now) had expected to be nearly-finished. Or at least, this is how she appears to have responded to it. My lengthy emails full of explanations and caveats fail to explain the difference, and perhaps understandably, she has been highly-critical of what she has seen. Too late, it is clear to me that remote consulting is a terrible way to conduct editorial consultations – but what archaeologist would be willing to conform to the schedule, workflow, and needs of a studio-based edit?

Still 6.3: Comparison of perspectives on the editing process: (left) my view of Rough Cut 9 within Avid, all options and information available to me; (right): participant’s view of the same version of the cut, editorially “blind” [Source: Rogers 2019].

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The second key obstacle is that I once again find myself an outsider to – yet dependent upon – the inner group of the organisation’s archaeologists. For instance, although I had been promised staff-level access to archaeological data at the commencement of the project (via a password to the staff’s intranet), this understanding seems to have evaporated by the time I need them. My requests for access to maps, diagrams, 3D models, photographs, and report findings to inform the narrative, are repeatedly forgotten, delayed for weeks at a time, the wrong file types sent, or most annoyingly my requests have been dismissed as being unnecessary. Kim tells me her team are too busy to send files to me, and that I should just use the versions already released publicly on social media. To this I argue I needed the original high resolution and correct file-types for animating and editing. Eventually, tired of being cut off from archaeological information (again), and mindful of further delays to the edit at my own expense, I decide to go straight to the source: those who had actually made the graphics (including volunteers or freelancers not employed by the archaeology organisation). They quickly and gladly provide me what I need, and it is nice to touch base with them again. But the fact that I went around Kim to get the visuals has only exacerbated our frustrations with each other.

The final problem I’ve encountered during these editing consultations, is that it is clear that Kim expects the filmmaking and the film itself to operate in the same way as a scripted factual TV programme or a corporate promotional video, rather than an authored, vérité documentary, despite the latter being our original shared aim as discussed in conversations, emails, and the original treatment. For instance, the fact that I have not got footage of the inscribed pot being discovered has proved to be a sore issue, especially as Kim considers this to be the climax of the excavation, a narrative propounded by the organisation’s press releases. Kim has asked me to include an on-site interview I filmed with her discussing the inscribed pot’s significance, one that I had disregarded at logging stage. I oblige her, and spend hours hunting for the interview, combing through hours of rushes, clip by clip. But I never find the interview Kim wants – because it doesn’t exist. Kim has misremembered events: the interview she had actually given was on a different day, about another artefact entirely. But when I report my findings back to Kim as tactfully as I can, it only seems to deepen her frustrations with me, and she suggests I should simply alter the image of the interview footage so it will appear as if she is talking about the inscribed pot, not the artefact she is actually holding in the video. I decline, frustrated at what seems to me a contradictory and hypocritical request given her previous complaints about

285 Chapter 6 accuracy and misrepresentation by filmmakers. During and since filming I have accepted the need to veil some less-than-palatable elements of archaeological reality, I am not after some kind of scandalous exposé, after all. But nor am I willing to sully myself with outright fabrication. As a compromise I cut Kim’s interview into the film, but in keeping with the actual date and context of the filmed artefact’s discovery. Many more similar disagreements continue to occur, some on factual grounds, some on ethical grounds, and I realise that my obligations as a documentary filmmaker with a commitment to report truthfully are increasingly in conflict with the archaeology organisation’s desire for positive publicity, even if that means not only omitting but even falsifying film footage. Our increasingly different aims remind me of some of my survey respondents’ opinions of “accuracy” in archaeology documentaries: that archaeologists were bad at representing archaeology accurately in their own reports and publications (see 3.3.4 R4445); or that accuracy only meant how archaeology as a discipline wanted to see itself (see 3.3.4 R3383). The excavation narrative as Kim imagines it simply does not match the reality which I experienced and captured on camera.

As I mentioned, Kim and I are already visually and aurally experiencing the rough- cut in very different ways, and her clear disappointment in the film is marked with increasingly lengthy and precise lists of editing changes she emails me, some with instructions down to the second of what footage to cut or find and add in (whether or not it exists). I in turn increasingly feel like my every decision is being queried, and respond with equally lengthy emails explaining what stage of the edit we are at and how vérité editing works – most of which seems to go unheard.

Ultimately, however, this worsening situation between Kim and I is my fault. I have assumed that I can share with or teach Kim the “professional vision” of documentary filmmaking, as I learned it through film school and independent practice. But she does not wish to learn from me. Thus, I have done exactly what filmmakers should never do: I have given power over the cut to someone who does not understand the techniques of filmmaking, yet presumes that they do, drawing out the edit and making it unnecessarily difficult (see Lumet 1995: 168). I have also naïvely attempted to collaborate up the archaeological hierarchy – a futile struggle in which my striving for equal footing seems only to be matched by Kim’s insistence in treating of me as an (in)subordinate. That we are largely dependent on emails and phone exchanges only deepens the growing sense of division between us.

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The lowest point of the edit comes when, unexpectedly, Kim sends me a draft of the credits as she envisions them. The credits headline Kim, followed by the rest of the organisation’s staff, yet there is no space for recognition of anyone who has contributed to the filmmaking itself (graphics, music, photography, animations, etc). Despite my work as writer, camerawoman, sound recordist, editor, director, and producer, my name is relegated to the general “Thanks” section with no recognition of my role, labour, or expertise. I thank Kim for her suggestions for the credits and instead proceed to draft them as I see fit. I feel exhausted, exploited, and misled. But more importantly, this confirms to me then that the organisation had never actually wanted a documentary, which necessitates a commitment to an authored, creative, truthful story. Rather, they want the veneer of the authenticity and legitimacy of a documentary, but with the same level of control as corporate, promotional videography, or scripted factual TV. Unable to meet Kim’s expectations, tensions between us continue to escalate, and the edit drags painfully onward.

***

By this stage I have spent upwards of 10 hours a day alone in my room editing, day after day, month after month. Before the consultations I was almost proud of the film, and felt that despite its imperfections it still had documentary merit. By now, at the end of the consultations, I have given up entirely on the film’s potential as a documentary. The film’s indexicality is severely compromised, any attempts at poetic experimentation are in style only, the narrative is uninspired having been torn in two opposing directions, and any hope of genuine rhetorical address is gone. At a fundamental level, the film has also failed to be about something. I have let myself become so overloaded with trying to please the archaeologists, that the story itself has been reduced to mere description. The film has become little more than a direction-less, over-long, half-hearted corporate video. What’s worse, as the film’s director I consider this to again be my fault for committing to a film that was perhaps doomed from conception. Again, as filmmakers like Lumet have acknowledged from his own practice:

“There are some pictures that we were all wrong about, from idea to script to execution. I was wrong, the writer was wrong, and the studio was wrong for financing it in the first place. There’s just no way of fixing that.” (1995: 202).

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Now I just want to complete it as soon as possible: to see it through, but move on.

6.3.15 Fine-cut

April 201*

Finally, after weeks of editing the fine-cut and six in-depth consultations with Kim, we arrive at picture lock. Picture lock means no more significant changes are to be made, and I can I finally begin the online edit.

Still 6.4: Online edit: applying colour corrections to each clip one by one, effect by effect, to ensure visual consistency [Source: Rogers 2019].

Still 6.5: Exporting the Picture Lock from Avid: transforming thousands of carefully curated visual and audio clips into a single video file [Source: Rogers 2019].

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I spend a week, night and day, polishing the final cut. This involves applying stabilizing effects to clips, in-frame 3D movements (tilts, zooms, pans etc), sound mixing atmos (to mitigate the differing noises from the wind and in-camera mechanisms), laying music and sound effects, rubber-banding audio levels (adjusting them to be within -20 to -14 dB), colour grading, and formatting and animating the stills and 3D models. Each clip and its audio has to be refined and carefully graded one by one (e.g. see still 6.4). The 3D models take a generous friend of mine all weekend to animate (a mammoth task and a huge favour to me), rendering them across 14 different computers and digitally-sewing them together in Adobe After Effects software. I carefully condense fourteen separate tracks of video into four (titles, captions, effects, and sub-clips), and re-lay my sound into six tracks (atmos, music, sound design, narration, and two spoken audio-tracks).

Exporting and compressing the film at a high resolution into a single video track and stereo sound tracks is a challenge on a laptop/external hard drive set-up, and takes several days of trials and errors – and crashes – to get a version that works (see still 6.5). I have to watch each exported version though in real-time to check for rendering errors such as dropped frames, digital artefacts, or other signs of corruption.

Finally, it’s done.

After just under a year of work – research, treatment writing, pre-production planning, filming, ambient sound recording, interviews, data wrangling, logging, assembling, editing, consulting, graphics formatting, applying special effects, laying subtitles, colour correcting, sound design, and animating – it’s done.

In comparison to other feature length documentaries made during the same period this film had been a quick turn-around – the majority of both US filmmakers (58%) and UK filmmakers (32%) take 1 to 5 years to complete their films before marketing them to broadcasters (Borum Chattoo and Harder 2018: 26; Whicker’s et al. 2017: 5). The fact that I had done this while supporting myself through part-time work (as 16% of UK documentarists also have to do according to Whicker’s et al. 2017: 4), recovering from illness, and pursuing my Ph.D. fulltime, was – and I have to remind myself of this – no mean feat.

But the next time I hear from Kim, she tells me the archaeologists are not satisfied, and want further changes. The main requests are to include extra credit text promoting the organisation and a hyperlink to its website, and to exclude the

289 Chapter 6 crediting of various contributors – including volunteers not employed by or contracted to the organisation, despite them still being in the film, and who’s digital visual products are used in the film. Instead, these products are also to be credited to the organisation. I decline to do the latter, especially without access to the authors of the materials myself, as I feel this is unethical and a breach of authorial rights. Having already experienced Kim’s attempt to exclude my own credits from the film, which breeched not only our prior written agreements but also UK copyright law, I no longer trust her to be fair or honest in copyright or crediting matters, and I do not wish to be implicated in the omission of someone else’s authorial rights. I also feel uncomfortable about adding more commercially promotional text – there is already some in the existing cut as it is – and after all, this was supposed to be a non-profit documentary. The terms of use for the music and other graphics used hinge on the film being non-commercial. Additionally, I have by this point negotiated or applied what I estimate to be over 100 requests or instructions for the edit from Kim. To return to the edit again would also mean throwing out all exporting work I had finished. Enough is enough. I remember back to when I had just begun the edit, when Kim had reassured me that they would respect my expertise, refrain from micro-managing the editing process, and not force me to work beyond what was reasonable. Now such promises have clearly been forgotten.

A heated phone call ensues. More demands.

I feel shaken, but I have found my filmmakers voice again. Enough. From my perspective, the film, in keeping with the terms of our original agreement, and my responsibilities as a filmmaker, was long finished and then some.

Silence from the archaeological end for a week. Then eventually, acceptance that I’m serious, and the film as it is will have to do.

The film is released, online, is positively received by audiences, and pulls over tens of thousands of hits to the organisation’s social media pages in the first week, as well as directing traffic to their business website. The archaeologists are pleased (I am told by Kim), and we end our collaboration on more civil terms. Kim generously also confirms that she is still happy for me to still use the film as a case study for my thesis.

6.3.16 Coda

February 2019

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In writing this autoethnography, I have weighed up carefully how much detail to include, how much personal narrative is necessary and appropriate to sufficiently demonstrate how documentary filmmaking in an archaeological context does/does not work, and to share, critique, and challenge what I suspect are problems that exist on a cultural level in archaeology.

The first of these problems is the contradictory expectations and definitions archaeologists have of documentary filmmaking, and how this plays out in practice, potentially with poor consequences for both archaeologists and filmmakers. I found myself very much hampered by the expectations I should have worked in the same way as for promotional videography or factual TV, such as by using a pre-determined script to construct a false archaeological narrative. My resistance to these demands led to attempts by one archaeologist to micro- manage me and my being criticised as being non-professional (as a filmmaker). Yet my observations of the factual TV producer, Nicole, also showed that the archaeologists were equally resentful of being asked to perform to her script, and averse to her media expertise and authority as well, despite her years of experience filming archaeology for television. Both she and I encountered a hostile archaeological environment that affected the depth and coverage we could get of events, despite both adopting very different filmmaking techniques and philosophies, and both attempting to respect the archaeological workflow and expertise. So whilst the influence of factual TV on archaeologists’ expectations certainly made my task as a vérité documentary filmmaker more difficult, factual TV’s influence does not seem to me to be the only or originating source of tension in the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking.

I suspect the real cause of tension in this relationship is the same tension that exists between documentary and all its other subjects: it is simply a conflict of power. Documentary filmmakers traditionally assume that the filmmaker is the one who holds much of the power (at least during production), and therefore responsibilities, in matters of representing participants. And in some instances, like factual TV, this is true (although as noted, production companies consider themselves subject to broadcasters, who are subject to governments and audiences, and so the buck is passed on). But on a broader societal level, documentary filmmakers also seek to ‘speak truth to power’, to challenge the status quo, often by examining those in elite positions who abuse their power. In the case study I have presented in this autoethnography – when as a filmmaker I sought to work within archaeology, I was the one subject to another’s power, and

291 Chapter 6 as an archaeologist, the camera gave me no power – yet nor was I relieved of my social and professional responsibilities as a documentarist. It was only when my instincts as a filmmaker took hold, that I felt able to stand up for my own rights, for the rights of other film contributors and participants as fellow authors, for the audience’s right to be told a truthful story, and for documentary as a vocation and community of practitioners. It wasn’t the process of filmmaking that gave me strength, but my underlying allegiance to the documentary mission. Thus, even though I was very much working from the bottom of a strict, gendered, archaeological hierarchy, through the documentary endeavour I still found myself fighting for some semblance of truth.

Although I still keenly felt the need to “do no harm” to my film participants and their interests, I also felt increasingly less responsible to cater to their desires when they behaved as elites and gatekeepers, such as by asking me to alter the reality of the story to fit a false but more dramatic or profitable narrative. Despite such frustrations, I had no wish to present a reality on film that was honest but potentially damaging. As a documentary filmmaker I was keenly aware of and sensitive to the need to juggle my conflicting ethical obligations during every stage of a production in which I was heavily personally invested. If I had been commissioned to make promotional videos none of these matters would be an issue – but we had committed ourselves to make a documentary – and through to the end, this remained the shared goal. We had committed ourselves to truth, and I saw it as my job to try to get us there.

This autoethnography also raises difficult questions about the nature of collaborative filmmaking in archaeological contexts. For comparison’s sake, for instance, the Know Your Bristol On The Move and University of Local Knowledge filmmaking projects were acts of (self-acknowledged) elites (academics and media makers) carefully “co-producing” with communities that were socially and economically disadvantaged, thereby inverting the power structures of academic and archaeological hierarchies, with the aim of equalizing community members access to, archiving of, voices within, and ultimately control over their own stories (Bristol City Council 2017a, 2017b; Insole and Piccini 2013; Piccini and Shaepe 2014; Piccini 2015a, 2015b). In contrast, in this autoethnography, I was attempting to collaborate up the archaeological hierarchy, and the result as it panned out was anything but equal, for the archaeologists as a cross-institutional body, myself as author, other non-archaeologist participants and contributors, and the local community in which we were filming. I am now sceptical of whether

292 Chapter 6 genuinely collaborative, vérité-style documentary filmmaking is even possible within an archaeological context. And if it cannot be collaborative, then what hope do vérité filmmakers have for accessing archaeology? Would archaeologists ever really be willing to relinquish the controls over narratives about the past, given how we have become so accustomed to controlling these narratives over the past century, as our discipline professionalised and set the terms for its own pathways of recording and reporting? Perhaps what archaeologists really desire from documentary, is docu-drama, documercials, or docu-fiction, or some other form of scripted reality.

Another lesson I learned the hard way was the importance of digging, even when one’s task is filming. This was the first excavation I attended and did not dig at, and I suspect it is not a coincidence that it is also the first excavation I came away from with no long-term friendships with the archaeologists afterwards. “Camaraderie in adversity” is a defining feature of field archaeology, informing everything from the flow of information on site through to psychological and tangible support between colleagues, as has been observed by ethnographers of archaeology (Moser 1995; 2007: 256; Edgeworth 2003: 21; and Zorzin 2010). As well as not physically labouring alongside the others in the rain and mud, my own physical exertions carrying and handling the heavy camera gear, even as the disease took hold of my body, mostly went unregistered by the archaeologists. Physical proximity was an issue as well: I was not stationed in a single trench or location, with a set group of teammates to work with, but instead constantly roaming alone between locations, also marked me as an outsider to the core archaeological mission and word-of-mouth flow of information (as observed by Everill 2012: 199). Similarly, my long evenings spent data wrangling kept me from that place that is so integral to archaeological bonding: the pub (Everill 2012; Moser 2007: 257). And finally, and although a few archaeologists were genuinely sympathetic, the fact that I showed increasing weakness and fatigue due to the undiagnosed diabetes during the excavation also flew in the face of the culture of physical machismo that defines field archaeology (Everill 2012; Moser 2007). For the first time, after years working in both commercial and academic archaeology, and despite being ‘embedded’, I was very much an outsider to archaeology, and it was deeply dispiriting.

The final lesson I learned was the importance of genuinely earned trust. Certainly, a written agreement had proved to be inadequate: the MoU specifying ownership and authorial rights was forgotten and transgressed by the archaeology

293 Chapter 6 organisation in the course of completing the film. Even if we had specified editorial rights in writing, I am not sure such an agreement would have been respected either. On the other hand, to be fair, even formal contracts of commission do not always prove binding for documentarists, when the instinct for truth takes hold. Claude Lanzmann’s holocaust documentary Shoah (1985), which has proved to be one of the most important documentaries of the 20th century, was only made possible by Lanzmann’s refusal to stick to the production schedule of the original Israeli government commission.8 Ken Loach’s In Black and White (1969) was commissioned by Save the Children to make a documentary about their work in Kenya, but his critical portrayal of the charity’s neo- colonialism led to the charity refusing to pay the commission and banning the film (it remained banned until 2011 until it was screened by the BFI). In a more recent example, even though originally commissioned by M.I.A.’s record company to make a formulaic album-promoting music documentary about the popstar, director Steve Loveridge broke his contract and instead made Matangi, Maya, M.I.A. (2018) from a social-justice angle, privileging the documentary mission over his contractual obligations. Despite the subsequent conflicts he had with Maya and her record company, the film proved critically and commercially successful (and happily Loveridge and Maya’s friendship survived). My little archaeology documentary of course was not aimed to be anywhere near the level of these works – it was only supposed to be a slow and gentle portrait of field archaeology – but the principle still applies: even contracts cannot necessarily tame archaeologists’ agendas, nor the documentary impulse. As goes for documentary practice more generally: mutual, hard earned trust seems the only real solution. And that takes time, and it cannot be imposed from the top down.

Such trust must also extend further than the archaeologist-filmmaker relationship. Like other documentarists I had found myself caught between my conflicting responsibilities to my three stakeholders – my film participants, my audience, and my own authorial voice (for a discussion of these conflicting responsibilities see Aufderheide et al. 2009: 1). During filming my ethical concerns had privileged my participants’ immediate needs, such as my decision to stop filming when asked by Albert even though I usually preferred to leave such decisions until the edit, or my decision not to even log obvious instances of poor archaeological practice or ethically questionable attitudes expressed in the

8 The original commission was 18 months for a 2-hour film. Instead Lanzmann took 11 years to make a 9+ hour film.

294 Chapter 6 course of the dig. Yet once the edit was underway, and as has been observed of other documentarists (Aufderheide et al. 2009: 15), I felt my allegiance shift increasingly in favour of the audience, with whom I had an unwritten social contract to present a story that was factually accurate, fair, and truthful. I also felt increasingly responsible for my fellow content creators and their authorial rights, via their contributions to the film. My conflicting responsibilities brought me into direct conflict with Kim, who after all, just wanted a nice movie to market her organisation’s archaeology project – and there’s no crime in that. But, as discussed, operating from the bottom of the archaeology hierarchy, I struggled to balance these responsibilities. My eventual rejection of the archaeological hierarchy was the only way to “do the right thing” as I saw it, such as my decision to oppose archaeology’s “erasing” or rendering “invisible” either my own or the voices and labour of those lower down the hierarchy, including fellow archaeologists, volunteers, and local community members (as also described by Gero 1996: 266; Edgeworth 2003: 6; Everill 2012). This was at least one potential benefit to operating outside the digging-based social hierarchy of archaeology.

***

I wonder if I should have picked a happier, easier, case study. One of the promotional videos I’ve made previously perhaps, which by nature comply with archaeology’s power structures and publicity goals, and are therefore easier and often more enjoyable to make (for both me and the archaeologists), with a better audience reach. But then I would just be avoiding the reality of my experience and the goal of this thesis: to explore and better understand the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. Acknowledging and interrogating the negative aspects of this relationship via an autoethnographic (or any other form of) case study is risky and uncomfortable, but ultimately crucial if we are to sincerely seek to improve the situation on a disciplinary level. On a personal level too, I have had to challenge and interrogate my own memory of events, and the feelings, assumptions, and attitudes that I’ve carried with me since. The archaeology-filmmaking conflict was indeed real – it is there in the raw film footage, in the emails, in my ethnographic/production diary. But by revisiting my records I am also reminded that there was also occasionally genuine affinity, kindness, and goodwill too: in the film footage, social media exchanges, and my diary, the archaeologists and I share jokes, meals, compliments, and we do try our best to get on with it. This gives me hope.

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I remember Rotha’s words: “I don’t think that the films themselves are the least bit important. What is important is the sort of spirit which lay behind them,” (in Aufderheide 2007: 37). This film originated with the best of intentions on both sides, but ultimately never found its documentary spirit. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it since I completed it. One day I might. But by now, it has largely been forgotten, just another of the billions of videos accumulating pixel dust on the internet.

6.4 Concluding thoughts

As Lucia Nixon observed when reflecting upon her own archaeological filmmaking efforts: “One of the most interesting things about technologies such as film is they can bring out the issues that were there all along.” (2001: 77). In this chapter I have presented an autoethnography of the production of an archaeology documentary, not to rebut or to counter archaeologists’ own narratives of such productions, such as those shared in the survey in Chapter Three, or explored historically in Chapters Four and Five, but simply to provide archaeologists with a documentary filmmaker’s personal perspective on the matter and in doing so, show the less known complexities, affinities, and contradictions that may occur in within the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking. I have attempted to de-mythologise and contextualize the technical processes, and the theory and logic behind the vérité approach in an archaeological context. I also hope that I have successfully humanized the filmmaking process, and revealed some of the underlying personal and embodied challenges faced by documentary filmmakers. As more archaeologists pick up the camera, for whatever kind of filmmaking, they deserve to know what they are potentially getting themselves in to. Accuracy, truth, (mis)representation, collaboration, authorship, agency, genre definitions, professional vision, and expertise – none of these have proved to be straightforward concepts in practice.

In sharp symmetry with the survey, the autoethnography has shown how archaeologists’ expectations of documentary appear to have very little to do with the genre itself, its conventions, or its role in society. In practice, some archaeologists expect attributes of the genre which it never had, and therefore which it (and its practitioners) can never fulfil. Inevitably, this can be seen to be one major source of mutual dissatisfaction. Again, as in the survey, we also see how the real benefits and strengths of the documentary genre – such as the unique authorial voice ascribed to the genre, documentary’s contribution to the

296 Chapter 6 arts, or documentary’s journalistic mission to ‘speak truth to power’ and challenge the status quo in society – continue to go disregarded by archaeologists.

At the end of my survey chapter I posed the question of why is there such a gap in expectation and understanding between archaeology and documentary filmmaking? What caused it, and why does it persist? Through autoethnographic analysis, and taking the history of the genre explored in Chapter Four and Five into account, I suspect that the answer lies partly in the dominating influence of factual TV on archaeology, which has eclipsed and overridden archaeologists’ knowledge of and expectations of documentary. However, this is not to demonize factual TV – as I have also contended, factual TV has provided real benefits for and made significant contributions to archaeology as a discipline. The other part of the problem is archaeology’s own entrenched and too-often unchallenged hierarchies, which compete against the different power relationships and values of the media and its practitioners. If we are to improve archaeology’s relationship with documentary filmmaking (and other media beyond), we must learn as a discipline to understand the documentary genre – and our place within it – by its own terms and values. If there is one real action that our discipline can take, resulting from this thesis, I hope it is that archaeologists will begin to do this.

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Chapter 7

Chapter 7 Conclusion

If you end up with the story you started with, then you weren’t listening along the way.

Matthew Heineman, interviewed by Mariayah Kaderbhai, Sheffield Doc/Fest 2018.

This thesis began with a simple but intentionally broad brief, to determine: what is the nature of the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking? Across media, technologies, time, theory, and practice, this is a relationship that has proved to be sometimes beneficial, sometimes frustrating, occasionally controversial, but always hopeful. Most of all, it has proved to be as much about how archaeology understands itself and its place within the media, and wider society. Throughout this thesis my main contention has been that archaeologists are filmmakers: we are presenters, performers, participants, camera-persons, editors, animators, writers, researchers, producers, directors, and more. If archaeologists are to demand that the film and television industry takes us seriously in these roles, we must first acknowledge and take seriously the contributions and expertise of those who perform these roles (both archaeologists and non-archaeologists working as our peers). Any desire to improve the relationship between archaeology and documentary must begin within our own discipline: our knowledge, our attitudes, our expectations, and our willingness to accept responsibility for our own agency.

In reviewing the archaeological literature on the topic, I found that although archaeologists are increasingly drawn to various non-fiction filmmaking praxes, the emphasis on scientific process rather than informed creative inquiry has driven a disengagement from film and documentary scholarship and practice. This has encouraged a position of ignorance and hostility towards the television and film industries, which in turn has led to further fundamental misunderstandings, such as the polarising view that documentary must be either “educational” or “entertaining” (when it may be both or neither); the unproblematised conflation of factual TV with documentary; and the fallacious call to “take back” archaeology from “the media”. Such overall negative discourse has served to foster widespread incomprehension and disenchantment within archaeology as a discipline towards documentary filmmaking and other sectors of

299 Chapter 7 the media, most regrettably resulting in our alienation from archaeology’s own corpus of non-fiction and documentary filmmaking practice.

By surveying archaeologists about their experiences of and attitudes towards documentary, I showed how taking part in film and television productions is a real but little known and unvalued sector of archaeological labour and expertise. I found that archaeologists’ mistaken conflation of factual TV (e.g. Time Team) with the documentary genre, was a key factor in confounding the different purposes, processes, and expectations archaeologists had towards different types of productions. Subsequently, although archaeologists’ concerns about personal and professional misrepresentation are indeed often valid and grounded in genuine experiences, archaeologists sometimes in turn unfairly treat and misrepresent documentary, film, television, and media practitioners within our own derisive narratives about “the media”. In the sometimes-echo-chamber of UK archaeology, such narratives have come to not only dominate discourse but to prevent the conversation from moving forward. The more nuanced and contradictory views shared by archaeologists in the survey, such as on specific issues including the purpose of an archaeology documentary or editorial rights, shows the dangers in sweeping assumptions about this relationship. Another key finding of this thesis is that there is no single narrative of archaeology’s relationship with documentary filmmaking. Instead, the merits of specific archaeology documentary productions, whether as a final product or regarding events behind-the-scenes, are best assessed and understood on a case-by-case basis (as is already the case in documentary film scholarship). Yet despite the many problems encountered and concerns held by archaeologists towards documentary filmmaking, an abiding theme was the hope that the relationship could improve, and the belief that despite all the real or perceived problems, participating in documentary filmmaking was still a worthy task for archaeologists to undertake.

In my historical survey I challenged archaeologists’ over-privileging of film’s scientific or promotional potential, an insular view which I argue has blinded us to the remarkable artistic, creative, and experimental century-long history of archaeology on non-fiction film. Instead, by using documentary theorist Bill Nichols’ criteria for documentary status as an initial guide, I have charted archaeology’s rich and vastly underappreciated presence in non-fiction and documentary filmmaking: from the advent of cinema with archaeologically themed actualitès in the 1890s, through to the cross-platform social-justice-

300 Chapter 7 motivated iDocs of the 2010s. Another key contention then, is that there is no distinct ‘archaeology documentary’ sub-genre, nor is it medium-specific, as has previously been assumed. Instead, I have reframed the definition of ‘archaeology documentary’ as ‘documentaries about archaeology’ that must fulfil documentary status first, and that operate across media. I also explored how shrewd individuals such as Thor Heyerdahl, Glyn Daniel, and more recently Brent Huffman, have strategically used documentary filmmaking as part of larger media strategies towards securing public support for, funding for, and dissemination of archaeological research interests (albeit with varying ethics regarding their desired outcomes and personal motivations). I showed how factual TV came to dominate archaeology’s representation on the screen, sometimes having a negative impact on archaeology, as well as complicating and weakening the relationship between archaeology and documentary filmmaking, but also providing positive benefits such as enabling public exposure, support, and funding for the discipline. Finally, I explored how new digital media have the potential to resolve many archaeologists’ concerns about documentary and factual TV (as raised in the survey), but that this cannot be achieved if archaeologists maintain the same preconceived expectations and antagonism towards the documentary genre and “the media” in general.

In the final component of my thesis, I undertook an autoethnographic study of a non-profit archaeology documentary, filmed and edited by myself, intended for online release. Autoethnography provided a method to present a filmmaker’s perspective on the process of documentary filmmaking within an archaeological context. I documented and analysed the key stages and process of production, the film theories and praxis-based knowledge motivating my decisions as a filmmaker, and the problems and challenges I encountered in filming an archaeological story. I found that adopting an open and collaborative approach to filmmaking in an archaeological context, operating as an embedded filmmaker- archaeologist, is by no means a silver bullet to problems of accuracy, truthfulness, or misrepresentation. If anything, such role-taking can further confound these issues, particularly given archaeology’s strict and gendered hierarchy. Instead, and in keeping with the resounding themes of this thesis, a returning issue was again the overriding influence of factual TV on archaeologists’ expectations of documentary, combined with archaeological ignorance of and antagonism towards the documentary form and filmmaker expertise, compounded by field archaeology’s restrictive hierarchy, which

301 Chapter 7 together became an insurmountable obstacle to fulfilling the documentary mission.

***

This thesis has had an admittedly ingenuous, sometimes awkward character to it – such is inevitable in exploratory research where the terrain must be traversed before it can be mapped. But, taken in tandem with complementary research such as that of Karol Kulik, Angela Piccini, Sara Perry, Amara Thornton, Colleen Morgan, and Greg Bailey, I trust that this thesis will help both interested archaeologists and filmmakers find their way more easily into studying or practicing documentary and non-fiction filmmaking in archaeological contexts. There remains so much more to be done to bring archaeology into a genuine dialogue with documentary practice and scholarship, with many topics only briefly touched upon in these pages.

Firstly, there is a pressing need to investigate the ethics of filmmaking in archaeological contexts, whether from a documentary perspective, journalistic, scientific, or regarding the use of archival films. This thesis has revealed several specific issues, each of which are worthy of dissertations in their own right. For instance, the economic relationship between archaeology and factual TV demands investigation, especially if television is indeed expected to be (or perhaps already is) functioning as a source of archaeological research funding. The financial remuneration of and professional status of archaeologists working as presenters also deserves careful scrutiny, as understandable calls for fairer pay and authorial recognition by archaeologists is potentially in conflict with journalistic standards and the democratising function of low-budget and non-profit documentaries. Similarly, as the 21st century digital economy continues to develop and adapt, the archaeological labour contexts for not only filmmaking, but also differing types of videography and photography (from drone to photogrammetry), IT design, archaeological illustration, and other forms of digital humanities demand further scrutiny from a sociological and professional studies perspective (ideally performed by researchers situated safely outside archaeology, without potential conflicts of interest) – if we are to better understand practitioners expertise and safeguard everyone’s rights within both filmmaking and archaeological labour contexts. The intersection of ethics and audience reception of archaeology documentaries also deserves more critical and up-to-date investigation.

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Another matter of urgency is an assessment of the archaeological value of over a century of film footage of ethnographic cultural material, archaeological sites, objects, and historic buildings, particularly when the filmed materials have since been altered or destroyed. These celluloid film records, some of which have been digitised but most not, have the potential to not only be remastered as high definition films but to serve as the basis for 3D models and high-resolution images of now missing or destroyed objects, buildings, and sites. I and Dr James Miles (2018) have already begun experimenting with these potentials, but this is a task that needs to happen on an international and multi-institutional scale if we are to keep up with the current crisis of quickly decaying celluloid film archives around the world.

Finally, I have discussed how archaeology documentaries continue to transition across media and storytelling modes, including video-on-demand platforms, VR, AR, interactive documentaries, and multi- and cross-platform works. It is imperative that before we commit ourselves to these new media that we do not bring with us the assumptions, misunderstandings, and missed-opportunities that has marred the relationship between archaeology, non-fiction filmmaking and documentary for so many decades now. Otherwise, as occurred with the introduction of television, we will find our discipline type-cast as light entertainment, and archaeologists’ and other heritage stakeholders voices and visions will continue to be curtailed, and archaeology’s role in society marginalised.

***

Jacquetta Hawkes famously declared, “every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires” (1967: 174). Although Hawkes was speaking to archaeological interpretations of the ancient monument, her words can also be applied to the subject of this thesis: every age, every generation, gets the archaeology documentary it deserves – and desires. It is up to archaeologists not to merely lobby the media for better representations of archaeology, but to educate ourselves about the options that exist to us, to engage with more diverse modes of non-fiction productions, and to respect media-makers’ expertise, if we are to improve archaeology’s relationship with documentary behind the scenes, and in doing so, documentary’s representations of archaeology on screen. In doing so, we will have to ask difficult questions of ourselves. Which is more important to us: “accuracy”, or truth? Publicity, or scientific and social responsibility? Audience reach, or social impact? Research dissemination, or interrogation? Discipline

303 Chapter 7 promoting, or discipline building? If our answers are the former, then the existing formats of factual TV and promotional videography will likely suffice our desires as a discipline going forward. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. If our answers are the later, then we must drop our assumptions and re-engage with the documentary genre and its community of theorists and practitioners as it exists in the 21st century. Ultimately, the story of archaeology always was, and is, up to us.

304 Appendices

Appendices

A: Archaeology documentary typologies as proposed by archaeologists between 1958-2014.

B: Off the Record Survey (2016) – Questionnaire.

C: Off the Record Survey (2016) – Graph summary of findings.

D: Nichols’ Documentary Film Modes (D.1) and Models (D.2) (2017).

E: ‘Excavations of Neolithic Site at Windmill Hill Near Avebury’ transcript (1925).

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Appendix A

Archaeology documentary typologies as proposed by archaeologists between 1958-2014.

Arranged chronologically and with similar typologies aligned for comparison.

307 Appendix A

Table 7.1: Archaeology documentary typologies as proposed by archaeologists between 1958-2014 (from Table 2.1).

Researcher(s) Kraemer Laude Beale and Healy Kulik Morgan Schablitsky Year 1958 1970 1975 2006 2014 2012; 2014

Location USA France USA UK UK US

Approach to According to film’s According to According to subject According to format or According to purpose typologies n/a perceived purpose audience matter representational style and qualities (if given)

Sample size 12 n/a 170 590 9 n/a

Educational films: Specialist Audiences Site specific Expository Expository Traditional For schools; experimental; (“Films de travail”) for documentary: documentary: documentary films: documentary: learning privileged over style; professional archaeologists. Single site focus; evocative of Educational; scripted; expert Teaching/outreach aims; Expert interviews; ‘Voice-of- modest production values (e.g. sense of place; Visually interviews; omniscient ‘traditional’; stand-alone; God- narration; emotional The Maya of Ancient and aesthetic (e.g. Han Tomb; Be’er commentary (e.g. The Celts). didactic; expert interviews; music; filmed on location; focus Modern Yucatan; From the Sheva Four). ‘Voice-of-God’ narration; on discovery; scripted; CGI; Remote Past of Greece; Tula to ‘popular’; ‘clichéd’; dumb-down science. Tulum). mockumentaries (e.g. In the Shadow of the Volcano, The Sphakia Survey: Method and Results; Ruins: A Fake Documentary).

Inspirational films: General audiences General syntheses: Direct Testimonial Host-based formula: Artistic; high production values; (“Films d’enseignement”) for Focus on civilizations/ films: Personality focus; host led; students and public audiences. atmospheric; emotional; cultures/regions; for TV; vary in Video diaries; ‘Aide-memoire’; expeditions to archaeological sites; scripted; CGI; reality TV aesthetic (e.g. By Ray Garner: quality; impressionistic; simple; linear accounts of The Ancient World: Egypt; The formats (e.g. The Naked emotive; cinematic; may or may archaeology on excavation Archaeologist, Bone Detectives, Ancient World: Greece; Be-ta-ta- not involve archaeologists; sites; ‘Ekphrasis’: verbally kin; Pompeii and Vesuvius). Solving History with Olly interviews as commentary; telling the visual story in Steeds, Time Team America, ‘representative’ at expense of monologue; most authoritative examples as given authors by Chasing Mummies; Digging for accuracy; can be factual; form of archaeological video; the Truth). educational for students (e.g. narrated by archaeologist; Ray Garner films; Mystery of the transparent authorship of Maya; The Man Hunters; In archaeological interpretations Typologies archaeology of documentaries, their characteristicsdefined authors, as by Search of the Lost World). (e.g. Çatalhöyük videos).

308 Appendix A

Researcher(s) Kraemer 1958 Laude 1970 Beale and Healy 1975 Kulik 2006 Morgan 2014 Schablitsky 2012/2014

Documentary: Problem or question- Detective: Impressionistic Similar to ‘Educational films’; oriented films: Heavily scripted; drama-led documentaries: visual record; high production Suit motion-pictures; dramatic; format; problem or question Lyrical; poetic; artistic; values (e.g. Lascaux: Cradle of driven (e.g. The Mystery of the expert led; theory/research subjective; can be confusing, Man’s Art). focused; for students/ Persian Mummy; The Riddle of frustrating; post-processualist. Pompeii). general public (e.g. Cracking (e.g. Skeuomorphs, In Transit). ––– the Stone Age Code). ––– Essay

documentaries: Follow one person’s ‘vision’; thematic structure; on-screen

presenter (often also the writer) (e.g. Great Excavations).

Training Film: Methodology films: Backstage: Phenomenological Method focused; modest Demonstrate field excavation Follow an excavation/research archaeological films: production values (e.g. Point of techniques or laboratory project; ‘Behind-the-scenes’; Captures the gaze of the Pines). analysis (e.g. Radiocarbon process based (e.g. Time Team, archaeologist; single, Dating; Modern Methods of Meet the Ancestors). continuous shot; ‘Punk’ Archaeological Excavation; Gate videography; experiential; Cliff: American Indian Rock How-to home-movie-like (e.g. ––– Shelter; 4-Butte-1: A Lesson in ––– Guttersnipe, Witmore’s Archaeology). documentaries: Peripatetic Video, The Sense of “Back-stage”; follow an Place project at Çatalhöyük). archaeological experiment; recreating past life ways (e.g. Secrets of the Ancients, Mysteries of Lost Empires, Surviving the Iron Age). examples as given authors by Interpretative: Experimental/ Reconstruction: Reconstruction based; feature ethnographic Dramatic reconstructions of the Typologies archaeology of documentaries, their characteristicsdefined authors, as by archaeologist experts; past (e.g. Neanderthal, Oetzi archaeological accuracy studies: the Iceman). privileged (e.g. The Beginning Demonstrates experiments, of History; the Vikings). reconstructions, or re- ––– enactments of ancient crafts ––– ––– and technologies; record of modern ethnographic crafts and technologies; time-lapse films; animations (e.g. Iron smelting in Ufipa; Stone knapping in modern Turkey.

309

Appendix B

Off the Record Survey (2016) – Questionnaire

Survey of UK Archaeologists in Documentaries 2006-2016

Section 1. Introduction

Dear Colleague,

As a UK based archaeologist who has participated in or worked on an archaeology documentary within the last 10 years you are warmly invited in this survey to share your thoughts and experiences on the process, and in doing so help shed light on the production of archaeology documentaries from an archaeological perspective.

This survey takes an average of 20 minutes to complete.

Participation is requested by professional UK based archaeologists who have personally taken part in any aspect of the production of an archaeology documentary within the last 10 years (therefore in or after May 2006). These archaeology documentaries may have been filmed either within the UK or overseas, but must have been filmed by a UK based production company (international-UK co-productions are also included). Television, cinematic, online, virtual reality, iDocs, multi- and cross-platform, non-profit, animated and uncompleted documentaries are all included. Fiction, reality TV, game shows, experimental or art works, news reports, corporate and promotional videos are excluded.

All answers are optional and you may withdraw your consent to participate at any time without penalty. Your answers are treated as fully confidential and will not be seen by anyone other than the researcher. Once downloaded the questionnaires will be coded and anonymised with serial numbers and stored only on secure password-protected external hard-drives. The overall analyses and interpretations of the data along with anonymised excerpts of select long form answers may be published in a Ph.D. thesis (expected to be completed by 2018). Any information that identifies any individuals or organisations will be obscured. All collected data will be used only for research purposes in the Ph.D. thesis and any publications related to it.

311 Appendix B

Please complete the questionnaire by 27th May 2016.

Please share this questionnaire with any fellow archaeologists who you think might like to participate: URL If you require further advice or information please email the researcher [email protected]

I express my deep and sincere thanks to you for giving your time to this survey and for contributing to this research.

Statement of Consent

Please read this information carefully before deciding whether to take part in this research. You will need to indicate that you have understood this information before you can continue. You must also be aged 18 or over to participate. By selecting the button at the bottom of this page and clicking ‘Continue’, you are indicating that you are aged 18 or over, and you are consenting to participate in this survey.

I have read and understood the information about this study. In consenting, I understand that my legal rights are not affected. I also understand that data collected as part of this research will be kept confidential and that published results will maintain that confidentiality. I finally understand that if I have any questions about my rights as a participant in this research, or if I feel that I have been placed at risk, I may contact the Chair of the Ethics Committee, Professor Chris Janaway, phone: +44 (0) 23 8059 3424, email: [email protected], Humanities, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.

Question 1.1: Statement of Consent:

I certify that I am 18 years or older. I have read the above consent form and I give consent to participate in the above described research.

[compulsory radio button]

Section 2. Extent of engagement

The questions of this page are to chart the frequency, variety and nature of archaeologists’ roles in the production of archaeology documentaries. Please remember to base all answers on your own experiences within the last 10 years.

312 Appendix B

Question 2.1: When was the last time you took part in the production of an archaeology documentary?

[select one]

-- Currently in production

-- In the last 6 months

-- In the last 12 months

-- In the last 5 years

-- In the last 10 years

-- Never

Question 2.2: How many archaeology documentary productions overall have you taken part in, in the past 10 years (in or after May 2006)?

[for the purposes of this study: one episode = one documentary, and shelved and incomplete productions are included.]

[text box]

Question 2.3: What roles have you had in archaeology documentary productions?

[select all that apply, listed in the order of the role you have held the most often as '1', through to the role you have held least often]

-- presenter (e.g. host)

-- key participant/subject (e.g. interviewee)

-- participant (e.g. present in wide-shots, minor or non-speaking role)

-- program researcher

-- consultant/advisor

-- writer

313 Appendix B

-- director

-- producer

-- executive producer

-- film crew member

-- editor

-- animator/graphic artist

-- production company employee

-- other

Question 2.4

If 'other' please specify:

[text box]

Question 2.5: What stages of archaeology documentary production have you taken part in?

[select all that apply, listed in the order of the production stage you have most often taken part in as '1', through to the production stage you have been least involved in]

-- concept development

-- pitching

-- funding

-- background research

-- treatment or script writing

-- location scouting

-- other pre-production

-- production

314 Appendix B

-- appearing on-camera

-- editing

-- animating/graphic design

-- other post-production

-- distribution

-- promotional activities

-- other

Question 2.6

If 'other' please specify:

[text box]

Question 2.7: What types of archaeology documentary productions have you been part of?

[select all that apply, listed in the order of the type you have most often been a part of as '1', through to the type you have least often been a part of]

-- Factual television series

-- Factual television one-off

-- Feature length one-off documentary for broadcast

-- Feature length one-off documentary for cinematic release

-- Short film

-- Web-series

-- iDocs (interactive documentaries)

-- Virtual Reality

-- Animated

315 Appendix B

-- Other

Question 2.8

If 'other' please specify:

[text box]

Question 2.9: On average, how much time each year do you estimate that you spend working on or with archaeology documentary productions?

[select one]

-- 8 hours or less

-- week (40 hours) or less

-- weeks (80 hours) or less

-- 4 weeks (160 hours) or less

-- Over 4 weeks (160 hours)

Section 3. Pay and Conditions

The questions on this page are intended for determining the creative, ethical, and practical working conditions on archaeology documentary productions. Please remember to base all answers on your own personal experiences within the last 10 years.

[text box]

Question 3.1: When working on archaeology documentaries what type of agreement do you usually have with the production body involved?

[select all that apply, listed in the order of the type you have had the most often as '1', through to the type which you have had least often]

-- Participant Consent or Release Form

316 Appendix B

-- Artists/Actors Contract

-- Other Contract of Employment

-- Verbal Agreement

-- None

-- Other

Question 3.2

If 'other' please specify:

[text box]

Question 3.3: Overall, do you believe these agreements are fair?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 3.4: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.5: Are you usually paid for your role in archaeology documentaries?

-- Mostly paid

-- Mostly not paid

-- Mostly paid ‘in kind’ (non-monetary)

-- N/A

317 Appendix B

Question 3.6: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.7: Overall, do you believe this level of payment is fair?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Undecided

-- N/A

Question 3.8: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.9: Would you agree to work for free on an archaeology documentary if you felt it was for a worthwhile cause?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 3.10: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.11: How often are you invited to review archaeology documentaries before their release?

-- Always

-- Usually

318 Appendix B

-- Sometimes

-- Rarely

-- Never

-- N/A

Question 3.12: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.13: How often are you given editorial rights over archaeology documentaries?

-- Always

-- Usually

-- Sometimes

-- Rarely

-- Never

-- N/A

Question 3.14: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.15: How often do you think archaeologists should be given editorial rights over archaeology documentaries?

-- Always

-- Usually

-- Sometimes

319 Appendix B

-- Rarely

-- Never

Question 3.16: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.17: How often do you think archaeologists should be given veto rights over archaeology documentaries?

-- Always

-- Usually

-- Sometimes

-- Rarely

-- Never

Question 3.18: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 3.19: What personal or professional concerns do you have when working on or with archaeology documentaries (if any)?

[text box]

Section 4. Perspectives I: Archaeologists on archaeology documentaries

The questions on this page aim to explore archaeologists’ opinions about archaeology documentaries and towards the documentary sector more widely. Please remember to base all answers on your own personal experiences within the last 10 years.

320 Appendix B

Question 4.1: Overall, do you think archaeology documentaries represent archaeology accurately?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 4.2: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 4.3: Overall, do you think archaeology documentaries represent archaeology fairly?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 4.4: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 4.5: What motivates you to work on or with archaeology documentaries?

[text box]

Question 4.6: In your opinion, what should be the main purpose of an archaeology documentary?

[text box]

321 Appendix B

Question 4.7: What are the characteristics of a bad archaeology documentary?

[text box]

Question 4.8: What are the characteristics of a good archaeology documentary?

[text box]

Question 4.9: In your opinion, are ‘celebrity’ archaeologists good for archaeology?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 4.10: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 4.11: Do you think UK archaeologists adequately understand the nature of documentary filmmaking and the workings of the wider media industries?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 4.12 : Optional additional comments:

[text box]

322 Appendix B

Question 4.13: Do you think UK archaeologists need better training and support in order to work on or in archaeology documentaries?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 4.14: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 4.15: Do you think archaeology documentary filmmakers adequately understand the nature and workings of archaeology?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 4.16: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 4.17: Do you think archaeology documentary filmmakers should have a background in archaeology, history or the sciences in order to make archaeology documentaries?

-- Yes

-- No

-- Unsure

Question 4.18: Optional additional comments:

323 Appendix B

Question 4.19: If you could summarise the current state of archaeology documentaries in one word or one phrase it would be:

[text box]

Section 5. Perspectives II: Archaeologists share their stories

In this section of the survey you are invited to share a story from your own personal experience of working on or with archaeology documentaries.

Question 5.1: Please share a story about one of your experiences when working on or with archaeology documentaries. It could be a story about an event or encounter that made a strong impression on you, whether typical or unusual, positive or negative, funny, surprising, or something that simply gave you food for thought. It could also be a story that illustrates your concerns, values or hopes for archaeology documentaries.

[maximum 500 words]

[text box]

Section 6. Demographics and Diversity

The questions on this page are for determining the overall demographic profile of this field of activity and for general comparisons with other sectors including archaeology, the film industry and public UK audiences.

Question 6.1: Please select your age:

[radio button selection for each age from 18 to 70]

Question 6.2: Please select your gender:

-- male

-- female

-- other

324 Appendix B

-- prefer not to disclose

Question 6.3: Where do you live?

-- Northern Ireland

-- Scotland

-- Wales England

-- Isle of Man

-- Channel Islands

-- Temporarily outside the UK

Question 6.4: What is your ethnic background?

White

-- Welsh

-- English

-- Scottish

-- Northern Irish

-- British

-- Irish

-- Gypsy or Irish Traveller

-- Any other White background

Mixed/Multiple ethnic groups

-- White and Black Caribbean

-- White and Black African

-- White and Asian

-- Any other Mixed/Multiple ethnic background

325 Appendix B

Asian/Asian British

-- Indian

-- Pakistani

-- Bangladeshi

-- Chinese

-- Any other Asian background

Black/African/Caribbean/Black British

-- African

-- Caribbean

-- Any other Black/African/Caribbean background

Other ethnic group

-- Arab

-- Any other ethnic group, please describe

-- Do not state

Question 6.5: Optional additional comments:

[text box]

Question 6.6: What is your highest level of qualification?

-- Bachelors degree

-- Masters degree

-- Doctorate (Ph.D. or DPhil)

-- Post-doctoral qualifications

-- Other

326 Appendix B

Question 6.7: If 'other' please specify:

[text box]

Question 6.8: What sector of UK archaeology do you mostly work in?

-- Commercial sector

-- University sector

-- Local Government sector

-- Civil society organisations

-- Museum sector

-- Other

Question 6.9: If 'other' please specify:

[text box]

Section 7. Survey End

Thank you for taking part in this survey, your time and insights are deeply appreciated.

Question 7.1: Would you like to be kept up to date with the findings and publications of this research?

[radio button] Please contact me with updates:

Question 7.1b: Please tell us your email:

[text box]

327 Appendix B

Question 7.2: Would you like to be contacted for an interview about your experiences?

[radio button] Please contact me to be interviewed

Question 7.2b: Please tell us your email:

[text box]

Thank you for taking this questionnaire.

328 Appendix C

Off the Record Survey (2016) – Graphic Summary of Findings

Please note warm palettes (red, orange, etc.) denote information that is treated as factual (e.g. demographic); cool palettes (blue, green, etc.) denote information that is treated as attitudes and opinions. Percentage totals are included within graphs.

Question 2.1: When was the last time you took part in the production of an archaeology documentary?

100 90 80 70 60 50 42 40 30 16 16 20 12 14 10

PERCENTGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTGE 0 In the last 10 years In the last 5 years In the last 12 In the last 6 Currently in months months production TIME SINCE RESPONDENT LAST TOOK PART IN A DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION (n = 139)

Question 2.2: How many archaeology documentary productions overall have you taken part in, in the past 10 years (in or after May 2006)?

100 90 80 70 60 53 50 40 30 20 20 16 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 6 10 2 1 1 0 1 < 5 < 10 < 20 < 50 < 100 100 + NUMBER OF PRODUCTIONS PARTICIPATED IN OVER PAST 10 YEARS (n = 139)

329 Appendix C

Question 2.3: What roles have you had in archaeology documentary productions?

24% Participant 49% Key Participant (e.g. (e.g. present in Interviewee) wide-shots, minor or non-speaking 24% Participant (e.g. present in 49% Key role) wide-shots, minor or non- Participant 9% speaking role) (e.g. Consultant/Adviso 9% Consultant/Advisor Interviewee) 13% Other (e.g.r Field archaeologist behind-the- scenes; fixer; 13% Other (e.g. Field producer; editor) archaeologist behind-the-scenes; 1% Programme 4% fixer; producer; editor) researcher Presenter/Host (n = 139)

Question 2.5: What stages of archaeology documentary production have you taken part in?

7% Other 7 2% Other post-production 2 1% Editing 1 66% Appearing on-camera 66 4% Production 4 1% Other pre-production 1 1% Location scouting 1 1% Treatment / Script writing 1 12% Background research 12 5% Concept development 5

0 20 40 60 80 100 PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS (n = 139)

Question 2.7: What types of archaeology documentary productions have you been part of?

0% Interactive documentary (iDoc)

0% Feature length documentary for cinematic release

2% Other (e.g. animated, virtual reality) 2 4% Web-series 4

6% Short film 6

8% Feature length one-off documentary for broadcast 8

26% Factual television one-off 26

57% Factual television series 57

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS (n = 139)

330 Appendix C

Question 2.9: On average, how much time each year do you estimate that you spend working on or with archaeology documentary productions?

100

80

60 54

40 28

20 10 3 4

PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 1 0 1 day or less (8 1 week or less 2 weeks or less 4 weeks or less Over 4 weeks Unanswered hours) (40 hours) (80 hours) (160 hours) (n = 139)

Section 3. Pay and Conditions

Question 3.1: When working on archaeology documentaries what type of agreement do you usually have with the production body involved?

4% Other 2% Actors/Artists Contract 58% Release Form 8% Other employment 15% None contract

13% Verbal 13% Verbal 8% Other employment contract 58% Release Form 4% Other 15% None

2% Actors/Artists Contract

(n = 139)

Question 3.3: Overall, do you believe these agreements are fair?

100 90 80 70 60 48 50 40 30 30 20 20 10 1 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered n = 139

331 Appendix C

Question 3.5: Are you usually paid for your role in archaeology documentaries?

100 90 80 70 56 60 50 40 31 30 20 11 10 1 1 0 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE Mostly not paid Mostly paid Paid 'in kind' (non- N/A Unanswered monetary) n = 139

Question 3.7: Overall, do you believe this level of payment is fair?

100

80

60

40 32 29 26 20 13

PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 0 Yes No Usure Unanswered n = 139

Question 3.9: Would you agree to work for free on an archaeology documentary if you felt it was for a worthwhile cause?

100 90 80 76 70 60 50 40 30 20 16

PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 6 10 1 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered n = 139

332 Appendix C

Question 3.11: How often are you invited to review archaeology documentaries before their release?

100 90 80 70 70 60 50 40 30 18 20 5 PERCENTAGE OF OF REPSONDENTS PERCENTAGE 10 2 4 3 0 Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never Unansweredn = 139

Question 3.13: How often are you given editorial rights over archaeology documentaries?

100 90 80 72 70 60 50 40 30 20 11 6 7 10 1 3 0 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never Unanswered n = 139

Question 3.15: How often do you think archaeologists should be given editorial rights over archaeology documentaries?

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 40 29 10 21 5 3 1

PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 0 Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never Unanswered n = 139

333 Appendix C

Question 3.17: How often do you think archaeologists should be given veto rights over archaeology documentaries?

100 90 80 70 60 50 41 40 30 18 20 20 13 6 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 10 0 0 Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never Unanswered n = 139

Question 3.19: What personal or professional concerns do you have when working on or with archaeology documentaries (if any)?

As answers were given as comments please see Chapter Three for discussion.

Section 4. Perspectives I: Archaeologists on archaeology documentaries

The questions on this page aim to explore archaeologists’ opinions about archaeology documentaries and towards the documentary sector more widely. Please remember to base all answers on your own personal experiences within the last 10 years.

Question 4.1: Overall, do you think archaeology documentaries represent archaeology accurately?

100 90 80 70 60

50 41 40 31 28 30 20 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 10 0 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered n = 139

334 Appendix C

Question 4.3: Overall, do you think archaeology documentaries represent archaeology fairly?

100 90 80 70 60 50 44 40

% RESPONDENTS 28 30 26 20 10 1 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered n = 139

Question 4.5: What motivates you to work on or with archaeology documentaries?

As answers were given as comments please see Chapter Three for discussion.

Question 4.6: In your opinion, what should be the main purpose of an archaeology documentary?

As answers were given as comments please see Chapter Three for discussion.

Question 4.7: What are the characteristics of a bad archaeology documentary?

As answers were given in as comments please see Chapter Three for discussion.

Question 4.8: What are the characteristics of a good archaeology documentary?

As answers were given as comments please see Chapter Three for discussion.

335 Appendix C

Question 4.9: In your opinion, are ‘celebrity’ archaeologists good for archaeology?

100 n = 139 90 80 70 60 56 50 40 31 30 20 11

PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 10 2 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered

Question 4.11: Do you think UK archaeologists adequately understand the nature of documentary filmmaking and the workings of the wider media industries?

100

80 67 60

40 23 20 6 3 0 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE Yes No Unsure Unanswered n = 139

Question 4.13: Do you think UK archaeologists need better training and support in order to work on or in archaeology documentaries?

100 90 80 70 65 60 50 40 30 24 20 10 10 1 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered n = 139

336 Appendix C

Question 4.15: Do you think archaeology documentary filmmakers adequately understand the nature and workings of archaeology?

100 90 80 70 60 60 50 40 32 30 20 8 10 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 0 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered

n = 139

Question 4.17: Do you think archaeology documentary filmmakers should have a background in archaeology, history or the sciences in order to make archaeology documentaries?

100 90 80 70 60 55 50 43 39 40 30 20 PERCENTAGE OF OF RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE 10 0 0 Yes No Unsure Unanswered n = 139

Question 4.19: If you could summarise the current state of archaeology documentaries in one word or one phrase it would be:

As answers were given as comments please see Chapter Three for discussion.

Section 5. Perspectives II: Archaeologists share their stories

In this section of the survey you are invited to share a story from your own personal experience of working on or with archaeology documentaries.

337 Appendix C

Question 5.1: Please share a story about one of your experiences when working on or with archaeology documentaries. It could be a story about an event or encounter that made a strong impression on you, whether typical or unusual, positive or negative, funny, surprising, or something that simply gave you food for thought. It could also be a story that illustrates your concerns, values or hopes for archaeology documentaries.

As answers were given as comments please see Chapter Three for discussion.

Section 6. Demographics and Diversity

The questions on this page are for determining the overall demographic profile of this field of activity and for general comparisons with other sectors including archaeology, the film industry and public UK audiences.

Question 6.1: Please select your age:

0% 18 - 24

28% 45 - 54 15% 25 - 34

17% 55 -64 33% 35 - 44 28% 45 - 54 4% 65 - 70 33% 35 - 44 0% Unanswered 17% 55 -64 15% 25 - 34 4% 65 - 70 0% 18 - 24 n = 139 0% Unanswered

Question 6.2: Please select your gender:

1% Prefer not to 0% Other 50% Male disclose 5% Unanswered 44% Female 50% Male 5% Unanswered

44% Female 1% Prefer not to disclose

0% Other n = 139

338 Appendix C

Question 6.3: Where do you live?

9% Scotland 79% England

6% Wales 9% Scotland 0% North Ireland 3% Temporarily 6% Wales Outside UK 79% England 0% North Ireland 3% Unanswered 3% Temporarily Outside UK

3% Unanswered n = 139

Question 6.4: What is your ethnic background? [Based on UK census options].

77% [White] 77% [White] Welsh/English/Scottis Welsh/English/Scottish/Northern h/Northern 3% [White] Irish Irish/British Irish/British 3% [White] Irish 18% Any other White Background 18% Any other White Background

1% Any 1% Any Mixed/Multiple Ethnic Mixed/Multiple Background Ethnic Background 1% Indian 1% Indian n = 139

Question 6.6: What is your highest level of qualification?

1% Unanswered 37% Masters Degree 5% Other 35% Doctorate (PhD or Dphil) 6% Post-doctoral 37% Masters 19% Bachelors Degree Qualification Degree

6% Post-doctoral Qualification 19% Bachelors Degree 35% Doctorate 5% Other (PhD or Dphil)

1% Unanswered

n = 139

339 Appendix C

Question 6.8: What sector of UK archaeology do you mostly work in?

28% 17% Other (Non- 40% University Sector Commercial profit; Self employed) Sector 28% Commercial Sector

17% Other (Non-profit; Self employed) 9% Local Government 40% 9% Local Government Sector Sector Universit y Sector 4% Museum Sector 4% Museum Sector 1% Civil Society 1% Civil Society Organisations Organisations 1% Unanswered 1% Unanswered n = 139

Section 7. Survey End

Thank you for taking part in this survey, your time and insights are deeply appreciated.

Question 7.1: Would you like to be kept up to date with the findings and publications of this research?

Question 7.2: Would you like to be contacted for an interview about your experiences?

340 Appendix D

Nichols’ Documentary Film Modes and Models

(Please turn over to compare tables)

341 Appendix D

D.1 Nichols’ Documentary Film Modes

Mode Common use Frequent goals Examples

Provide an account of a Convey a point of view or make an An subject through commentary argument in a clear, engaging Inconvenient and images of illustration (b- manner. Truth (2006).

Expository roll).

Follow and observe social Stimulate viewers to make Jesus Camp actors as they go about their inferences and draw conclusions (2006), lives. from what they observe, rather Salesman than what they are told. (1969). Observational

Feature engagement Offer insights into people or Chile, between filmmaker and situations from what they reveal Obstinate subject to draw them out in when engaged by the filmmaker, Memory revealing ways and to through interviews and other (1997), Where develop a story or interactions. to Invade Next Participatory perspective. (2015).

Draw attention to the Make viewers more aware of the F for Fake

conventions, assumptions, formal conventions, social (1973); No and expectations underlying qualities, assumptions, and Lies (1973).

Reflexive documentary films expectations of documentary films.

Create an aesthetically Encourage viewers to see the Koyaanisqatsi

pleasing experience in mystery, wonder, or beauty of (1982), relation to some aspect of aspects of the world, or to engage Leviathan

Poetic the world. with difficult issues in an oblique (2012). way.

Stress the filmmakers Convey a sense of what situated Waltz with embodied, expressive and embodied knowledge and Bashir (2008), engagement with an issue, experience of the world feel like. Tongues situation, or event. Untied (1989). Performative

A web-based interactive Give the viewer choices and Fort McMoney experience to enhance our multiple pathways to follow as they (2013), Prison understanding of the world. increase their knowledge on a Valley (2009).

Interactive given topic or issue.

342 Appendix D

D.2 Nichols’ Documentary Film Models

Model Common use Frequent goals Examples

Provide a fact-based Inform, dispute dominant Enron: The

account of a topical issue. interpretations of issues, bring Smartest fresh perspectives to light. Guys in the

Reporting Room (2005). Investigative Investigative

Provide personal Share a personal view of situations The Gleaners

perspective on issues or or events, reflect on identity and and I (2000). events as experienced by relationships from an individual Diary the filmmaker. perspective.

Provide an account of Offer new perspectives on a public Amy (2015). someone’s life or a figure or bring to light a less well- significant part of it. known one. Biography

Convey the distinct Provide a nuanced picture of how a San Soleil perspective of a single particular individual sees the world (1983);

person (usually the and contends with issues that arise Tarnation - person

Essay filmmaker): their life, in his or her life. (2003).

First observations, encounters

Represent another culture Provide insight into the structure Dead Birds or subculture in an and function of a given group and (1963), Les illuminating manner. culture. Maïtres Fous (1955). Ethnography

Describe and explain Account for past events in an The Battle of

historical events, account engaging and enlightening Chile (1975; for their significance. manner, often through the eyes 1976; 1979),

Writing and in the words of experts, The Civil War Historical Historical witnesses or participants. (1990).

Create a sense of a Give a richer more embodied Shoah (1985), i es

r person’s or group’s portrait of a person or event by Word is Out o experience through the offering first-hand witnesses and (1977). words of those who lived testimony. Oral Hist Oral

Testimony and it.

Note: films can deploy multiple modes and models (after Nichols 2017: 156-157).

343

Appendix E

‘Excavations at Neolithic Site of Windmill Hill Near Avebury’ transcript (1925).

Excavations at Neolithic site of Windmill Hill near Avebury (Archive). [non- fiction, 16 mm; MP4]. Alexander Keiller (attributed photography). United Kingdom, 1925. British Film Institute. Available to view on site at BFI.

Excavations at Neolithic Site of Windmill Hill Near Avebury (Original) N-523889 Digital (MP4) AVC codec 137 MB original is 35mm film, nitrate, BW positive Acquired 1995-01-11 1 can 241 feet 1925 (Release) United Kingdom BFI 20/11/2015 Viewing version Reference number 348797 Original/Master Reference number C-808708 “Credits: Photography?” Alexander Keiller.”

inter-title:

THE NEOLITHIC SITE OF WINDMILL HILL; NEAR AVEBURY, WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND

image: Jilty pan of landscape showing various trenches, features.

inter-title:

Excavations carried out during 1925 by:-

inter-title:

H. St. George GRAY.

345 Appendix E

image: Older man reeling tape, chatting, smiling, laughing.

inter-title:

and VERONICA M. KEILLER.

image: Young woman with basket, speaking to cameraman, standing in front of hedge.

inter-title:

and ALEXANDER KEILLER F.S.A. (Scot.)

image: Man speaking, gesturing with pen, taking notes in notebook, smiling at the camera.

inter-title:

assisted by:- O.G.S. CRAWFORD F.S.A. (Archaeological Officer, Ordnance Survey.)

image: Man standing in front of trench, car, smiling, speaking to cameraman, woman smiling chatting at him from behind bottom L corner.

inter-title:

One more “close-up”! WILLIAM E. V. YOUNG (“Flint Young”,) Foreman of the digging gang.

image: Man grinning in front of spoil heap, seemingly laughing at something said off camera.

346 Appendix E

inter-title:

A PLAN of the ANCIENT EARTHWORKS on WINDMILL HILL.

image: Paper map plan for approx. 40 seconds. [Assumedly for live lecture purposes].

inter-title:

The daily route to the site of the excavations would have presented difficulties to any other mode of transit than “The Oobit” (Citroen-Kegresse Caterpillar) which proved invaluable throughout the work.

image: Vehicle driven by man over and down deep slope.

inter-title:

The chalk downs of North Wiltshire suited the “Oobit” excellently, since gradients, however steep, worry her not at all.

image: Oobit with 4 passenger driving in and out of a ditch like a rollercoaster. Waving, tipping hats, clearly having a laugh; camera pans to follow.

inter-title:

The Caterpillar formed a natural “advanced head- quarters in the field” on a cold day.

347 Appendix E

image: Man hunkered down next to/under wheel rim.

inter-title:

When all hands were needed elsewhere, the Citroen, loaded up, was despatched across Windmill Hill on her own.

image: Oobit passes across locked off shot with no driver.

inter-title:

Difficulty was sometimes experienced when she reached her destination in persuading her that the journey had been completed.

image: Keiller runs up to rolling car gesturing it to stop, then he runs round front jumps in [nearly 2/3 through film].

inter-title:

Excavations in progress in INNER DITCH

image: Shovelling x 1, 3 others.

inter-title:

The Cuttings in the Inner Ditch, looking Westwards towards the wood.

image: Establishing shot; locked off of spoil heaps.

348 Appendix E

inter-title:

INNER DITCH; Cuttings Nos. I and II and between them one of the “causeways” which, inter- secting the ditches, are a typical feature of neolithic (“Late Stone Age”) earthworks.

image: Keiller walks in to wide shot of trench, and indicates sections with measuring staff, mimes 10 and 2 with fingers and thumbs to camera, looks again, walks out of frame. Regularly looks at camera/audience, does not attempt to speak. [For live lecture purposes?].

inter-title:

INNER DITCH; Cutting No. I. showing a section of the silted-up ditch.

image: Keiller kneels and indicates features out of/below frame of section [despite this, this footage is still edited in to the film].

inter-title:

The stratification shows the silting from the banks into the ditch at different periods. The large rubble at the foot of the ditch is what is called “rapid silting”, and takes place very shortly after construction. Anything found among the rapid silt may be considered as practically contemporary with the construction of the work.

349 Appendix E

image: Same shot, but now Keiller indicates bottom of section, staff unfolds to measure depth, looks.

inter-title:

Photographing the excavations in INNER DITCH; Cutting No. VI.

image: Wide est. shot of 2 tripods (1 camera; 1 dumpy); 2 men show the photographing (one man photographs the other as he dig in the trench) = filming the photographing/recording process.

inter-title:

End of Part 1.

Also at BFI:

Excavations at Windmill Hill (Archive) [non-fiction, 35 mm; MP4]. Alexander Keiller (attributed producer and sponsor). United Kingdom, 1925. 9 mins. British Film Institute. [Available to view on site at BFI. For transcript contact K. Rogers].

Excavating Windmill Hill (Archive) [amateur film, 35 mm]. Alexander Keiller (attributed photography). United Kingdom, 1925. British Film Institute. [Restricted access to preserve film].

350 Glossary of Terms

Glossary of Terms

Assemblage: A linear sequence of video and audio clips composed early in the editing process (during the offline edit). The shots are moved from the order of being filmed, towards the order of being watched in the final cut.

Atmos: AKA ‘Atmosphere’. Audio recordings of ambient sound used to ease transitions between different clips in the editing process.

Artefact: Visual corruptions of the digital image that occur during the editing process.

Bin/binning : Specific location and process of categorising film footage in Avid, similar to files/filing on a computer drive.

Cinéma-vérité: AKA ‘vérité’, ‘truth-cinema’. A mode of documentary filmmaking that combines observational documentary ethos with creative license, in pursuit of a higher truth.

Clip: Visual and/or audio selections made from filmed rushes, and catalogued for ease of access during editing.

Close up: A type of shot where part of a subject or object takes up most of the frame.

Cross-platform: Media content or storytelling that either operates across different media in different ways (e.g. a linear documentary feature film, accompanied by a multilinear interactive iDoc, and mobile app game); or which operates in the same way on different platforms (e.g. a linear documentary film watchable on television, YouTube, mobile phone, etc). (Sometimes called multi-platform, transmedia).

Cut: The process of editing film, based on the literal cutting and pasting together of celluloid film strips. Also the word given to the beginning or end of a specific shot or clip, or a full sequence being edited, e.g. a rough-cut.

351 Glossary of Terms

Cut-away: AKA B-roll. A type of shot of something other than the main subjects, used in the film as bridging device, to ease transitions between clips, and create breathing space in the flow of the film.

Dead cat: Furry windshield for microphones. Looks how it sounds.

Direct Cinema: A mode of observational documentary filmmaking.

Establishing shot: Usually a wide shot of a location at the beginning of a scene, used to communicate context for a scene, such as a new location, passing time, human relationships.

Final-Cut: The finished film, after the online edit.

Fine-Cut: The version of the film after the rough-cuts, and before the online edit. By this stage the storyline is established, and aesthetics experimented with. There can be any number of versions of the fine-cut. Sometimes used as “director’s cuts”.

Frame: A single still image played rapidly and sequentially to become a shot, clip, etc. 16mm refers to 16 frames per second, 35mm to 35 per second, etc. Also refers to the image visible on the screen.

Jump-cut: An abrupt transition between two sequential clips, often taken from the same original shot, or filmed from the same aspect.

Locked-off: When there is no camera movement (i.e. the camera is “locked” into position on the tripod).

Logging: First stage of the offline edit. Cataloguing the rushes in the editing software to allow them to be accessed more easily for editing purposes.

Offline editing: The first stage of editing when the film’s visual and audio sequence is created, usually in lower resolution.

Online editing: The second stage of editing when the sound design and image quality is adjusted and optimized to industry standards (e.g. colour correction, sound mix), working at the appropriate resolution.

352 Glossary of Terms

Pan: A horizontal camera movement taken from a fixed point.

Picture-Lock: The final visual version of the film, prior to sound design.

Placeholder: Temporary imagery, text or music inserted into the film sequence usually during the rough-cut, until the final versions of these can be sourced and spliced in.

Pre-Production: The pre-filming stage of film production, including research, consultations, location scouting, legal and technical preparations.

Production: The filming stage of film production. Also a way to refer to a film inclusive of its conditions of manufacturing.

Post-Production: The post-filming stage of film production prior to distribution, including editing, colour correction, sound design, animations, dubbing, etc.

Reithianism: Reithianism takes the view that public service broadcasting should ‘inform, educate, and entertain’, in service of the nation and without commercial influence, among other principles

Render: A intensive computational process where alterations (e.g. special effects, de-bugging, etc) are made to visual or audio material, frame-by-frame, effect-by-effect. Can take a matter of seconds, or a matter of weeks, depending on the product.

Rough-Cut: The version of the film after the assemblage and before the fine-cut, where the storyline is developed and refined and the film begins to resemble what will be the final version, but may still contain errors, placeholders, and undergo significant changes. There can be any number of versions of the rough-cut.

Rushes: The raw unedited film footage, prior to being made into clips and logged.

Sequence: A selection of visual and audio clips edited together in a linear composition, according to a unified chronology/series of events/storyline/themes.

353 Glossary of Terms

Shot: A moving image composed of a series of still frames that run for a period of time. In filming, a shot refers to the period of recording from beginning to end. In editing, a shot refers to the period between two cuts on either end.

Sub-clip: Visual and/or audio selections made from previously made clips, and catalogued for ease of access during editing.

Sound-design: Editing the aural equivalent of the story, e.g. ambient sounds, music, voice optimization.

Splice: Adding in new material to the film sequence.

Take: A single continuous film recording.

Tilt: A vertical camera movement taken from a fixed point.

Transition: An effect applied between visual and audio clips to alter how they relate to each other, e.g. to dissolve, fade, jump-cut, etc.

Treatment: A written outline created prior to a script. In documentary, treatments are often used a guideline during pre-production to plan the parameters of the filming.

354 List of References

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387

List of Film References List of Film References

Please note some of the documentary films listed here were also broadcast on television, some re-cut into shorter versions. These are indicated with an asterix (*). Where I have viewed both versions, I list both. Otherwise, the versions I list only the formats I have either seen, or which I discuss in this thesis.

10, 000 BC (2015-2016) [Reality television series] UK: Channel 5.

A Chinese Threat to Afghan Buddhas (2013) Directed by Brent E. Huffman. [Documentary short film] April 23 2013. 7 minutes 39 seconds. USA: New York Times. Available at: http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/opinion/a-chinese- threat-to-afghan-buddhas.html (Accessed: 2 July 2018).

Agelastras Petra (Mourning Rock) (2000) Directed by Filippos Koutsaftis. [Documentary feature film] [DVD]. 87 minutes. Greece: Greek Film Centre.

Aku-Aku (1960) Directed by Thor Heyerdahl; cinematography by Erling J. Scherven; edited by Olle Nordemar. [Documentary feature film] 1 hour 26 minutes. Norway: Artfilm.*

American Digger (2012 - 2013) [Television series]. USA: Discovery Networks.

Amo (2018) Directed by Max Lowe. [Documentary short film] July 10. 7 minutes 7 seconds. USA/Rapa Nui: The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcqBP5t4GvM (Accessed: January 4 2018).

Ancient Aliens (2010-current) [Television series] USA: History Channel.

Animal Vegetable Mineral (AVM) (1952-1959) Produced by Paul Johnstone; Contributors: Glyn Daniel; Mortimer Wheeler; et al. [Television gameshow series]. UK: BBC.

BA2_25_8 (1998) Contributor: Ruth Tringham. [User generated online video] August 25. 3 minutes 29 seconds. Turkey: BACH Area Excavation Video, Çatalhöyük Research Project. Available at: http://www.catalhoyuk.com/video/bach (Accessed 27 September 2017).

Battlefield Recovery (AKA: Nazi War Diggers) (2016) [Television series]. UK: National Geographic, BBC.

389 List of Film References

Bikini Atoll (AKA: Atomic Ghost Fleet) (2015) Directed by Phil Harper [VR documentary]. 18 minutes. UK: Alchemy VR. Re-cut 2017 Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb1Q2IQfKmE (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

Bone Detectives (2007) [Television series] USA: Discovery Channel.

Britain’s Secret Treasures (2012-2013) Contributor: Bettany Hughes. [Television programme] UK: ITV.

Bromans (2017) [Reality television show] UK: ITV2.

Buried Treasure (1954-1959) Produced by Paul Johnstone; Contributors: Glyn Daniel; Mortimer Wheeler; et al. [Television series] United Kingdom: BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p017t7tn (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Directed by Werner Herzog. [Documentary feature film; DVD] 89 minutes. France/ United Kingdom: Creative Differences/History Films/Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/Arte France/Werner Herzog/Filmproduktion/More4/Picturehouse Entertainment.

Chasing Mummies (2010) Contributor: Zawi Hawass [Reality television series] USA: History Channel.

Chronicle (1966-1976) Produced by Paul Johnstone; Contributors: Glyn Daniel; Mortimer Wheeler; et al. [Television programme]. UK: BBC. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/chronicle/ (Accessed 6 March 2019)

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark (1969) Produced by David Attenborough; Contributor: Kenneth Clark [Television series] UK: BBC.

Civilisations (2018) [Television series] Contributors: Simon Schama, David Olusoga, and Mary Beard. [Television series] UK: BBC2.

Civilisations AR (2018) [AR app] Produced by Nick Hanson. UK: BBC Arts/BBC R&D/Nexus Studios. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/civilisations-ar (Accessed 3 July 2018).

Coast (2005-2015) [Television series] Producer Jonathan Barker; Contributor: Neil Oliver, Alice Roberts, et al. UK: BBC 2.

Das Grosse Museum (The Great Museum) (2014) Director Johannes Holzhausen. [Documentary feature film] [DVD]. 94 minutes. Austria: Navigator Films.

390 List of Film References

Daughters of Eve (2010) Directed by Paul Tickell; Contributor: Bettany Hughes [Television programme]. 14 February. UK: Channel 4.

Descente de la grande pyramide (1897) Produced by Louis and Auguste Lumière ; Cinematography by Alexandre Promio. [Actualité]. 24 April. France: Lumière Film Company/Lumière Archives [382]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbPjWEMEfr0 [Accessed: 13 December 2018].

Digital Me (2015) Directed by Sandra Gaudenzi and Mike Robbins [iDoc] Helios Design Labs. Available at: http://www.interactivefactual.net/digital-me/ (Accessed: 8 March 2019).

Digging for Britain (2010 – current). Contributor: Alice Roberts; et al. [Television series]. UK: 360 Productions/BBC4. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014hl0d (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

Digging the Past (2007) Contributors: Barry Cunliffe, Tony Robinson, David Attenborough [Television programme] UK: BBC.

Divine Women (2012) Contributor: Bettany Hughes [Television programme] UK: BBC.

Do Not Track (2015) Directed by Brett Gaylor [iDoc] Upian/Arte. Available at: https://donottrack-doc.com/en/intro/ (Accessed 8 March 2019).

@DurotrigesDiaries (2017-current) [User generated online videos series] Bournemouth University: UK. Available at: https://twitter.com/DuroDigDiaries/media?lang=en (Accessed 6 March 2019).

Easter Island – A Mystery is Solved (1987) Directed by Bengt Jonsson; Written by Thor Heyerdahl. [Television programme] 1 January. Sweden/Norway: Sebra Film/Official NKR (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation).

Épaves (1943) Directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. [Documentary film]. 28 minutes 35 seconds. France: Ministére de l’Education Nationale/Institute Pédagogique National/Cinématèque de L’Enseignement Public.

Excavations at Neolithic site of Windmill Hill near Avebury (1925) Photography: Alexander Keiller [Non-fiction film] [MP4]. United Kingdom, British Film Institute.

Excavating Scene at the Pyramids of Sakkarah [Egypt] (1903) Produced by Thomas Edison; cinematography by A. C. Abadi. [Non-fiction film, 16-mm]. 17 June. USA: The Edison Manufacturing Company.

391 List of Film References

Excavations at Windmill Hill (1925) Produced by Alexander Keiller. [Non-fiction film] [MP4]. 9 minutes. UK: British Film Institute.

Excavating Windmill Hill (1925) Photography by Alexander Keiller. [Non-fiction film] [35-mm]. UK: British Film Institute.

First Australians (2008) Directed by Rachel Perkins. [Television series]. Australia: Blackfella films/SBS.

‘First Peeps of Tut-ankh Amen’s Tomb’ (1923) Daily Sketch Topical Budget [Newsreel] 4 minutes 14 seconds. UK: British Film Institute. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIop9OwRaQA&t (Accessed 6 March 2019).

‘For love or money’ (1973) Chronicle [television programme]. Produced by Paul Johnstone. 49 minutes. UK: BBC.

‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’, (AKA: ‘The Lost Island of Munga’, ‘A High Sea Adventure’), (1973) The Goodies. Produced/Directed by Jim Franklin; Contributors: Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden. [Television programme]. 4 March. UK: BBC2.

Galápagos (1955) Directed by Per Høst; Written by Thor Heyerdahl. [Documentary television programme] 14 February. 1 hour 18 minutes. Norway: Per Høst Film AS.*

Guttersnipe: A micro road movie (2011) [User generated online video] Directed by Angela Piccini. 14 minutes. UK. Available at: https://vimeo.com/30077905 (Accessed: 2 February 2015)

Great Excavations: John Romer's History of Archaeology (2000) Contributor: John Romer [Television series] UK: Channel 4.

Helen of Troy (2010) Contributor: Bettany Hughes [Television programme] 14 April. 103 minutes. UK: Channel 4.

Hoa Hakananai‘a: There and Back Again (2009) ‘A Po – The Rapa Nui Youth Involvement Project’ [User generated online video] Rapa Nui: Terevaka Archaeological Outreach. 8 minutes 27 seconds. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pobmgoJpYPk (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

Indus Valley to Indira Gandhi (1970) Directed by S. Krishnaswamy. India: Krishnaswamy Associates.

392 List of Film References

In Limbo (2015) Directed by Antione Viviani [iDoc] Arte/MIT Docubase. Available at: inlimbo.tv/en/ (Accessed: 8 March 2019).

In Transit (2006) Produced by Greg Bailey [User generated online video] 14 minutes 57 seconds. UK: University of Bristol. Available at: http://www.archaeologychannel.org/video-guide/video-guide-menu/video-guide- summary/258-in-transit. (Accessed: 23 October 2017).

Invincible Wreck Web Tour (2018) [interactive web tour] UK: Pascoe Archaeology. Available at: https://www.cloudtour.tv/invincible (Accessed: 2 July 2018).

‘Iron Age Camp’ (2015) City of a Thousand Years, Edited by Yang Liu [Non-fiction, MP4] 34 seconds. Map Your Bristol: UK. [Original Title BROFA/0013, (1937) Produced by F. G. Warnes and R. F. Warne. 37 minutes 54 seconds. UK]. Available at: https://www.mapyourbristol.org.uk (Accessed: 27 September 2017).

Kildalton Chapel Reconstruction (2017) [interactive web tour] UK: Islay Heritage. Available at: http://islayheritage.org/kildalton-chapel-reconstruction/ (Accessed 25 March 2019).

Kon Tika Masala Trailer (2013) Mads Andreassen. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOERYZlz96k (Accessed 14 August 2019).

Kon-Tiki (1950) Directed by Thor Heyerdahl; Produced and edited by Olle Nordemar [Documentary feature film] [DVD]. 141 minutes. English version. Norway: Sol Lesser Productions; Syncron Film. Film print from Archives of the Norwegian Film Institute.

Kon-Tiki (1950) Written, Produced and Cinematography by Thor Heyerdahl; Edited by Olle Nordemar. [Television broadcast version] [DVD]. 58 minutes. English version. Norway: NKR TV International. Print from the Archives of the Norwegian Film Institute.

Kon-Tiki (2012) Directed by Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg. [Feature film] [DVD] 114 minutes. Norway: Nordisk Film.

La Septième Merveille du Monde (1997) Produced by Stéphane Millière. [Television programme]. 56 minutes. France: France 2.

Lascaux (2009) Directed by Norbert Aujoulat [Interactive web tour] France : Ministère de la Culture. Available at: http://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en (Accessed: 3 July 2018).

393 List of Film References

Les Pyramides (Vue Générale) (1897) Produced by Louis and Auguste Lumière; cinematography Alexandre Promio [Actualité]. 12 March - 18 April. Lumière Film Company/Lumière Archives (117 [381]).

- YouTube version available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5R9gy9yi2E (Accessed: 18 December 2018). - Critical Commons version available at: http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/kfortmueller/clips/les- pyramides-1897/view (Accessed: 15 January 2018). - Wikimedia version (high resolution) available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Les_Pyramides,_1897.webm (Accessed: 13 December 2018). - Catalog Lumière version (high resolution) available at: https://catalogue- lumière.com/les-pyramides-vue-generale/ (Accessed: 13 December 2018).

L’Île de Pâques (1935) Directed by Henri Storck; written by Henri Lavachery [documentary film] [MP4] 23 minutes 12 seconds. Belgium: Foundation Henri Storck. Available at: http://fondshenristorck.be/en/henri-storck/filmography- hs/films-alphabetically/easter-island/ (requires password). (Accessed: 2 January 2018).

Living in the Past (1978) Produced by John Percival [Television series] UK: BBC2.

Lost Kingdoms of Africa (2010-2012) Contributor: Gus Casley-Hayford [Television series]. UK: BBC4.

Lost Treasure of Kabul (2002) Writer and Contributor: Dan Cruickshank [Television programme] UK: BBC2.

Lost Worlds (2002) Produced by Phillip Day. [Television series]. UK: Channel 4.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Directed by Dziga Vertov [Documentary feature film] [DVD] Soviet Union: All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration.

Meet the Ancestors, (1998-2004) Contributor: Julian Richards [Television series]. UK: BBC2

Mega Movers. Ancient History Moves (2007) 17 May. 45 minutes. USA: 44 Blue Productions/History Channel.

394 List of Film References

Message from Mungo (2014) Directed by Andrew Pike, Ann McGrath. [Documentary feature film] [DVD]. 70 minutes. Australia: Ronin Films.*

Misère au Borinage (1934) Directed by Joris Ivens and Henri Storck [Documentary feature film]. Belgium: E.P.I, Club de l’Ecran, Brussels.

Mysteries of Lost Empires (AKA: Secrets of Lost Empires) (1997-2000) [Television Series] USA/UK: PBS Nova/WGBH/BBC/Channel 4.

Mystery of Easter Island (2012) 7 November. 53 minutes. USA: Committee Films/NOVA/National Geographic/PBS.

Neanderthal (2000) [Television series] UK: Channel 4.

‘Norman Arch’ (2015) City of a Thousand Years Edited by Ed. Yang Liu [Non- fiction, MP4] 18 seconds. UK: Map Your Bristol. [Original Title BROFA/0013 (1937) Produced by F. G. Warnes and R. F. Warne, original length 37 minutes 54 seconds. UK]. Available at: https://www.mapyourbristol.org.uk (Accessed: 27 September 2017)

Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia for the Light) (2010) Directed by Patricio Guzmán. [Documentary feature film] [DVD] 1 hour, 30 minutes. Chile/France/Spain/Germany: Atacama Productions, Icarus Films.

Operation Nightingale: Time Warriors (2012) Produced by Simon Morris. UK: Wessex Archaeology/Salisbury Arts Centre [User generated online video] Available at: https://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/operation-nightingale (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

Origins of Us (2011) Contributor: Alice Roberts [Television programme] 18 October. UK: BBC.

‘OTM Video Blog 20 (new)’ (2015) Know Your Bristol On the Move [vlog] [MP4]. 10 June, 3 minutes 25 seconds. UK: Bristol City Council, Calling the Shots. Available at: http://knowyourbristol.org/videos/ (Accessed: 27 September 2017).

Out of the Maya Tombs (AKA: Dance of the Maize God) (2014) Directed by David Lebrun [Documentary feature film]. USA : Nightfire Films.*

Palestine Remix (2015) Produced by Ali Al-Arian et al. Qatar: Al Jazeera. Available at: https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/palestineremix/ (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

395 List of Film References

Par 18 Mètres de Fond (1942) Directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau [Documentary short film] 14 minutes 50 seconds. France.

Pompeii: The Last Day (2003) Directed by Peter Nicholson [Television programme] 20 October. 90 minutes. UK: BBC 1.

Priority Unit 31578 (2017) Contributor: Arek Klimowicz [User generated online video] 1 min 57 seconds. Turkey: Çatalhöyük Research project. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEhC5e-LzvA (Accessed: 27 September 2017).

Pyramid (2002) Directed by Jonathan Stamp [Television programme]. 28 October. 60 minutes. UK: BBC 1.

Queen Wins Norway’s Heart AKA Royal Visit to Norway (1955) [newsreel] 2 minutes 8 seconds. UK: British Pathé. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLlxsUqRfEA [Accessed: 29 November 2018.

Ra (AKA: The Ra Expedition) (1971) Directed by Thor Heyerdahl; Produced by Lennart Ehrenborg [Documentary feature film/television broadcast] 1 hour 46 minutes. Norway/Sweden: Sveriges Radio.*

Rachelamun (2016-current) Directed by Rachel McMullan. [User generated online video series]. UK. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu7oxHVBemRuErORN6P1R6w (Accessed 6 March 2019).

Saving Mes Aynak (2014) Directed by Brent E. Huffman; Contributor: Qadir Temori [Documentary feature film/television programme] [DVD]. US: German Camera Productions/Kartemquin Films/Icarus Films. 60 minutes. Available free online for Afghanistan viewers at: http://savingmesaynak.vhx.tv/ (Accessed: 2 July 2018).*

Saydnaya (2018) Directed by Eyal Weizman [iDoc]. UK: Forensic Architecture/Amnesty International. Available at: https://saydnaya.amnesty.org/ (Accessed: 3 July 2018).

SCAPE Archaeology (2017-current) Directed by Tanya Venture et al. [User generated online videos]. UK: SCAPE. Available at: https://vimeo.com/coastarch (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

Secrets of the Ancients (1999) [Television series] UK: BBC2.

396 List of Film References

Skeuomorphs (2008) Directed by Colleen Morgan. [User generated online video] 13 minutes 41 seconds. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe5RVFHg0sA. (Accessed: 23 October 2017).

Sphakia Survey (1996) Produced by Lucia Nixon et al. [Television programme]. Greece: ERT2. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpx9fpFVkYg (Accessed 16 August 2019).

‘St John Baptist Church’ (2015) City of a Thousand Years. Edited by Yang Liu [Non-fiction film] [MP4] 56 seconds. UK: Map Your Bristol. [Original title: BROFA/0013, Produced by F. G. Warnes and R. F. Warne, original length 37 minutes 54 seconds. UK]. Available at: https://www.mapyourbristol.org.uk (Accessed: 27 September 2017).

Stonehenge – panorama of the Ancient Druidical Remains (Original) (1901) [actualité] [MP4] 1 min. UK: Warwick Trading Company/British Film Institute. Available at: http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-stonehenge-panorama-of-the- ancient-druidical-remains- 1900/?utm_content=bufferb09a6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitterbfi&ut m_campaign=buffer (Accessed: 31 July 2017).

Surviving the Iron Age (2001) [Television programme] UK: BBC1.

Temples of Cambodia (2017) Produced by Alaa Batayneh [Interactive web tour] Qatar: Al Jazeera. Available at: https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/cambodia-temples/ (Accessed: 3 July 2018).

Ten Fathoms Deep (1946) Directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau [Documentary film] 8 minutes 32 seconds. Castle Films: France. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz-vxImMHTk (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

The Ancient World: Egypt (1955) Directed by Ray Garner [Television series] US.

The Beginning of History (1946) Directed by Graham Wallace; written by Jacquetta Hawkes [Feature film] 45 minutes. UK: Ministry of Information; Ministry of Education.

The Cave (2017) Directed by Qi Zhao [Interactive installation tour] Showcased at IDFA DocLab. 15 minutes. See: https://www.doclab.org/2017/the-cave-2/ (Accessed: 3 July 2018).

397 List of Film References

The Drift (2017) Directed by Maeve Brennan [Feature documentary film and installation]. 51 minutes. UK/Lebanon: Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island Artspace, Bristol. Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery;Spike Island; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; and Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore.

The First Monday in May (2016) Directed by Andrew Rossi [Feature documentary film] 90 minutes. USA: Magnolia Pictures.

The Great Plunder (2018) Directed by Steve Chao [Feature documentary film] 26 minutes. Qatar: Al Jazeera. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2018/07/nepal-great-plunder- 180718082431778.html (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

The Great Plunder (2019) [iDoc app] Qatar: Al Jazeera. Available at: https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2018/nepal-great-plunder/index.html (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

The Lost Centuries (1971) Directed/produced by Forbes Taylor; Contributor: Brian Hope-Taylor. UK: Anglia Television.

The New Rijksmuseum (2013) Directed by Oeke Hoogendijk [Documentary feature film] 130 minutes. Netherlands: Column Film.*

The Quipo Project (2015) Directed by Maria Court and Rosemarie Lerner [iDoc] Chaka Studio. Available at: https://interactive.quipu- project.com/#/en/quipu/intro (Accessed 8 March 2019).

The Thistlegorm Project (2017) [Interactive web tour]. UK: University of Nottingham. Available at: http://thethistlegormproject.com/ (Accessed: 3 July 2017).

Time Team (1994-2014) Produced by Tim Taylor; Contributor: Tony Robinson [Television series] UK: Channel 4.

Time Team America (2009-2014) Produced by Tim Taylor [Television series]. USA: PBS.

Tony Robinson’s Time Walks (2012-2014) Contributor: Tony Robinson. [Television series] Australia: History Channel.

The Celts (1986-1987) [Television series] UK: BBC2.

The Mystery of the Persian Mummy (2001) [Television series] UK: BBC2/TV6.

398 List of Film References

The Naked Archaeologist (2005-2010) [Television series] Canada/US: Vision TV/History Channel.

The Riddle of Pompeii (2001) [Television programme] UK: Channel 4.

The Seventh Wonder of the World (1997) Produced by Stéphane Millière [Television programme] 50 minutes. UK: BBC.

The Silent World (1956) Directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau [Documentary feature film] 86 minutes. France: FSJYC Production/Requins Associés/Société Filmad/Titanus.*

The Sphakia Survey (1995) Directed by Nixon, L., Moody, J., and Price, S. [Television programme] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpx9fpFVkYg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt0V7PO1cnY (Accessed: 6 March 2019).

Treasures of the Sunken City (1997) Produced by Stéphane Millière [Television programme] 18 November. USA: NOVA.

Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2016) Directed by Sam Hopkinson; Contributor: Damien Hirst [Documentary feature film]. UK: Science, The Oxford Film Company.

‘The Investigators’, (1966) Who Were the British? Directed by Forbes Taylor; Produced by Peter Hunt; Writer/Contributor: Brian Hope-Taylor [Television programme] 27 June. UK: ITV, Anglia TV.

Underworld: A Virtual Exploration of Subterranean London. (2018) Produced by Francesca Pannetta [VR and interactive web tour]. UK: The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2016/nov/10/virtual- reality-by-the-guardian# (Accessed: 2 July 2018).

Win and Second Hand Crane (1970-1973) Produced by Paul Johnstone; Contributor: Magnus Magnussen [Television series] UK: BBC.

399

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